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THE MAGAZINE OF INTERNATIONAL MEDIA | OCTOBER 2016
WWW.WORLDSCREEN.COM
MIPCOM Edition
MASTERS OF
TELEVISION Shonda Rhimes Dick Wolf Howard Gordon Vince Gilligan SAM ESMAIL Jon Bokenkamp SCOTT GIMPLE CHARLIE BROOKER Noah Hawley OLIVER Goldstick PAOLO SORRENTINO and more! Kazuo HIRAI SONY CORPORATION Ben Sherwood Disney|ABC Richard Plepler HBO Arnaud de Puyfontaine Vivendi Ron Howard & Brian Grazer IMAGINE ENTERTAINMENT Jørgen Madsen Lindemann MODERN TIMES GROUP marco BASSETTI BANIJAY GROUP John de Mol Talpa MEDIA Mike Hopkins Hulu Hugh Marks Nine ENTERTAINMENT
PLUS: CONTENT TRENDSETTERS
Jennifer Lopez
+
Kiefer Sutherland, Matthew Perry, Aidan Turner, Lizzy caplan & WAGNER MOURA
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CONTENTS
OCTOBER 2016/MIPCOM EDITION
THESE TARGETED MAGAZINES APPEAR BOTH INSIDE WORLD SCREEN AND AS SEPARATE PUBLICATIONS:
U.K. MARKET PROFILE MTG’S JØRGEN MADSEN LINDEMANN BANIJAY GROUP’S MARCO BASSETTI ARTE’S PETER BOUDGOUST
172 176 180 184
FRENCH ANIMATION LIVE-ACTION SHOWS BOOK-BASED PROPERTIES DIGITAL EXTENSIONS MARGARET ATWOOD TURNER’S CHRISTINA MILLER
252 260 268 280 288 292
FACT-BASED DRAMA NORDIC NOIR AMC NETWORKS’ CHARLIE COLLIER MASTERS OF SEX’S LIZZY CAPLAN NARCOS’ WAGNER MOURA
372 380 386 390 394
SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS CO-DEVELOPMENT PARTNERSHIPS TALPA’S JOHN DE MOL NBCUNIVERSAL’S PAUL TELEGDY MICHAEL VON WÜRDEN
440 448 456 460 464
FOOD SERIES HISTORY DOCS HISTORY’S JANA BENNETT CURIOSITYSTREAM’S ELIZABETH HENDRICKS NORTH
492 500 506
PAY-TV ORIGINALS JAPANESE CONTENT NHK’S KATSUTO MOMII
534 542 551
OTT DEVELOPMENTS IMAGE NATION’S MICHAEL GARIN
560 566
LATIN AMERICAN DISTRIBUTORS RCN’S FERNANDO GAITÁN
600 610
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508
LISTINGS FOR MORE THAN 160 DISTRIBUTORS ATTENDING MIPCOM 635
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WORLD VIEW
BY ANNA CARUGATI
The Power of the Written Word Do you find yourself wondering more and more about the state of our world? I do. I field a constant barrage of questions in my head all day long. Why is there so much hatred? What motivates individuals to perpetrate acts of death and destruction? Why has widespread ignorance taken the place of critical thinking? I can’t help myself; the questions just keep popping up like tennis balls launched from an automated machine. Can I not look at my smartphone every two minutes? Can any reporter get Donald Trump to actually answer a question? Is it true that the current situation in Europe echoes the political and economic conditions of the 1930s? Is it fear or ignorance that is fueling the rampant prejudice against people of different religions, ethnicities and sexual preferences? Did I answer that email? Why can I never match up all the pairs of socks after doing the laundry? Surely I can’t be the only one obsessing over queries big and small. It seems some people are satisfied with quick, simplistic answers. Others choose to ponder causes and effects more deeply, even though the exercise becomes ever more frustrating because there are no easy answers. Perhaps there is some consolation in the fact that since the beginning of time, people have been seeking answers. Indeed, questions—practical and existential—have always been at the root of storytelling, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Greek myths and legends from around the world and even the Bible. Themes of morality, envy, abuse of power, dominance and human frailty have been at the core of stories dating back to the days of oral tradition, and today they span media from the printed word in books and plays to film and TV. We hear so often today that TV is home to some of the best writing, and that series have become novelistic. In this issue, we focus on everyone involved in this storytelling, from writers and showrunners to producers who champion and finance them to executives whose channels and outlets disseminate shows to viewers. Along with my colleagues Mansha Daswani and Kristin Brzoznowski, I spent several months interviewing some of television’s most fascinating storytellers. It’s been a thrill to get a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process: coming up with viable ideas, breaking stories, running writers’ rooms, rewriting, working with actors and crews, supervising editing. We heard how they start with a blank screen and end up with compelling, must-see series. And along the way, in keeping with the tradition of all great storytelling, they seek answers to life’s big questions. Shonda Rhimes, who will have five shows on the air this season, including Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, and is MIPCOM’s Personality of the Year, often centers her series on power and ambition. Dick Wolf, whose shows have been on the air for nearly 30 years, continues to
Writers and showrunners shed light on complex issues and help us
understand our world.
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examine right and wrong through the lens of the criminal justice system, first responders and doctors in his Chicago franchise. The varying degrees of right and wrong have been fertile material for Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad and now pens the show’s prequel, Better Call Saul, with writing partner Peter Gould. Scott Gimple, in The Walking Dead, examines survival and identity in a post-apocalyptic world. Jon Bokenkamp, with The Blacklist, explores what turns individuals into criminals. Noah Hawley takes the iconic film Fargo and probes human motivation in the eponymous TV series. Whether technology enables us or enslaves us is among the topics probed in Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror and Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley’s Humans. Howard Gordon is fascinated by geopolitics and America’s role in the world, core themes of his show Homeland. Oliver Goldstick looks at the role high fashion played in France’s recovery following World War II in The Collection. In Versailles, Simon Mirren offers a twist on the period drama through an examination of the politics of power, a subject Academy Award winner Paolo Sorrentino also dives into in The Young Pope. With insight, curiosity, nuance and sensitivity, these writers and showrunners shed light on complex issues and help us understand our world and ourselves. We also hear from actors who take the words in the script, interpret them and bring characters to life: Jennifer Lopez in Shades of Blue, Kiefer Sutherland in Designated Survivor, Wagner Moura in Narcos, Matthew Perry in The Kennedys: After Camelot and The Odd Couple, Lizzy Caplan in Masters of Sex and Aidan Turner in Poldark. We have an in-depth interview with master storytellers and Academy Award winners Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who talk about the creative freedom offered by television and how they blended documentary and scripted storytelling in their upcoming series MARS. We also speak at length with top media executives whose companies are driven by content and storytelling: Sony’s Kazuo Hirai, Disney|ABC’s Ben Sherwood, HBO’s Richard Plepler and Vivendi’s Arnaud de Puyfontaine. We also talk to executives from a broad cross section of the TV industry, including Talpa Media’s John de Mol, Nine’s Hugh Marks, Hulu’s Mike Hopkins, Banijay Group’s Marco Bassetti, Modern Times Group’s Jørgen Madsen Lindemann, Turner’s Christina Miller, NBC’s Paul Telegdy, NHK’s Katsuto Momii and HISTORY’s Jana Bennett. And once again this year, World Screen will partner with Reed MIDEM to present Kids’ Content Trendsetter Awards and Content Trendsetter Awards to programming executives who source shows that entertain and often address the significant questions and issues of our day.
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GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
BY BRUCE L. PAISNER
The Vulgarization of Daily Life One of my favorite commentators is Peggy Noonan. I try never to miss her weekly column in the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t, but earlier this year I thought she missed the point in a rather significant way. She was essentially bemoaning the decline of politeness in American politics, as exemplified by Donald Trump’s use of the “P-word” [editor’s note: pussy: off-color slang for a woman’s body part, often used to denote weakness] at a rally. She wrote, “I thought, so we have come to this.” But the really valid point is that we have come to “this” in every other place in our culture, and probably the only surprising thing is that it didn’t creep into politics long ago. When it comes to language, organizations from HBO to The New Yorker in the U.S. do not censor themselves at all, and the same is true of other broadcasting and print organizations around the world. Although this is an American example, it’s a worldwide issue. In democratic countries, organ izations tend to censor themselves, but TV companies everyplace are pressured by the realities of language and changing attitudes in their own societies. And in more authoritarian countries, what goes on beneath the surface is a constant battle between the authorities and news and information creators about what will be acceptable. How did we get here, and does it matter? American readers with long memories will remember television of the 1950s and 1960s. If you worked in the business at that time, particularly on a broadcast network level, the bane of your existence was a network department called Standards and Practices. No line of dialogue went on the air, indeed no sentence made it to an actor’s mouth, until it had been reviewed and, usually, bowdlerized by Standards and Practices. What happened after the 1960s, I believe, is that television and technology changed. The civil rights movement and particularly the Vietnam War simply caused people to get really angry and express their thoughts in public places, now covered regularly by television cameras. Take the Vietnam War chant directed at President Lyndon B. Johnson: “One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucking war!” In the 1970s, Standards and Practices worked valiantly to keep any real thoughts out of scripted programs, but censoring the news was more complicated. And then along came HBO with a philosophy that they could make the world as real as they wanted to because the viewer had an option: to cancel the subscription. At about the same time, people who made
We are in a transitional period on language, as we
are on so many other things in our complex lives.
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motion pictures, desperate to attract radicalized younger audiences into theaters, changed the subject matter, focus and thus inevitably the language. In movies from the 1970s on, people increasingly spoke the way they do in real life, and when that real life is taking place on a battlefield or any other kind of fight, the language is more authentic and much more coarse. We hardly think twice about this when we go to a theater to watch a movie or even when we play one at home. My view is that the overspreading of once unacceptable language into all forms of television and motion pictures gradually caused this language to seep into regular conversation across all socio economic lines. And then along came the internet, where virtually nothing is off-limits or out of bounds. All societies have standards, and standards do matter for the existence of human civilization. But for the standards to work, they must be in line with what’s really going on in the society. In all aspects of our lives, things change and have throughout history. Until the 15th century, almost no one but monks read books. Until the American Revolution, virtually everyone in the world was governed by kings, emperors or other absolute rulers. The bathing suits of today shock people who went swimming in full dress costumes well into the last century. And, of course, until 1919 in the United States women could not vote. This year Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Party’s candidate for President. So the interesting point to me is not that Donald Trump used the P-word but that there is no convincing reason why the use of all words should not spread into our political dialogue just as it has spread everywhere else in our society. I am inclined to think this is neither good nor bad but perhaps inevitable. (Which is not to say that Mr. Trump’s ideas get the same pass as his language. Perhaps there will be more to say on that later on. Or perhaps not.) And perhaps our and Ms. Noonan’s shocked reaction to his language (she said she felt “a wave of sadness”) is evidence that we are in a transitional period with regard to language, as with so many other aspects in our complex lives in a changing society. I wonder if 20 years from now George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words (which did not include the Pword, by the way) will just be part of everyone’s vocabulary. And if so, no doubt society will come up with other things that people cannot say or do in the polite company of that era. Bruce L. Paisner is the president and CEO of the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
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UPFRONTS
108 Media Passionate TV / The Weekend Sailor / Problemski Hotel The five-part docuseries Passionate TV spotlights the inspirational stories of people who are following their dreams while also trying to make the world a better place. Created and produced by Auroris Media, the series sits under the 108 Believe banner, a distribution arm developed “with the intention of delivering stories that uplift and inspire,” says Abhi Rastogi, the CEO of 108 Media. Also part of the 108 Believe lineup, The Weekend Sailor is a documentary about the first crewed sailing race around the world. In the scripted arena, Problemski Hotel is a comedy/drama film directed by Manu Riche and based on a novel by Dimitri Verhauls. “These titles have global appeal,” says Rastogi. “108 Media got involved knowing that our buyers worldwide would be satisfied in any territory.”
“Telling fascinating stories from around the world, these films and documentary topics were developed with international themes at their core.” —Abhi Rastogi Problemski Hotel
ABS-CBN International Distribution I’ll Never Say Goodbye / The Promise / Dolce Amore Jericho Rosales, the so-called “Asian prince of drama,” stars in I’ll Never Say Goodbye, which ABS-CBN International Distribution is offering up to buyers. “With sympathetic characters and a plot that will evoke the strongest of emotions, the show will strike a chord with lovers everywhere,” says Evelyn “Leng” Raymundo, the company’s VP of integrated program acquisitions and international distribution. ABS-CBN International Distribution is also presenting The Promise, a remake of the Philippines’ drama of the same name. “With its upgraded production values and modern take on iconic characters, the drama carves a name for itself befitting its title,” says Raymundo. Further highlights include the romantic drama Dolce Amore, telling the love story of a beautiful Italian heiress and streetsmart Filipino orphan.
“ABS-CBN crafts dramas that are both relatable and gratifying for every second of our audiences’ emotional investment.” —Evelyn “Leng” Raymundo I’ll Never Say Goodbye
all3media International Common Sense / Worst Bakers / National Treasure From Studio Lambert, the makers of Gogglebox, comes Common Sense, a weekly topical comedy series that all3media International is distributing globally. The show sees a broad cross section of people delivering opinions on all sorts of topics, from eye-grabbing headlines to the latest trends sweeping the nation. “The appeal of this format is that it is simple and inexpensive and, much like Gogglebox, the personalities borne out the series will become part of the zeitgeist and social currency,” says Sally Habbershaw, the executive VP of sales and co-productions for North America at all3media International. Worst Bakers, meanwhile, is a spin-off from the hit Worst Cooks, a long-running ratings winner on Food Network in the U.S. There’s also the fourpart drama National Treasure, penned by Jack Thorne.
“National Treasure is shocking and thoughtful, and is told from multiple perspectives.” —Sally Habbershaw National Treasure 36 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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AMC Global Fear the Walking Dead / Humans / Halt and Catch Fire The AMC Global channel, which debuted in 2014, is now seen in more than 125 countries. Three new feeds recently rolled out across Central Europe, where 24-hour networks are now serving audiences in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Romania and Slovenia. A deal with beIN brought the channel to pay TV in the MENA region, while a carriage pact with KPN in the Netherlands sees AMC Global now reaching 95 percent of all Dutch pay-TV homes. “We’re looking forward to continuing this growth trajectory over the next year,” says Harold Gronenthal, the executive VP of programming and operations for AMC Global and Sundance Channel Global. Fear the Walking Dead is among the programming highlights for the channel, along with the third season of Halt and Catch Fire and season two of Humans.
“We have a diverse lineup of exclusive original series premiering on AMC Global over the next few months.” —Harold Gronenthal Fear the Walking Dead
American Cinema International Runaway Romance / A Royal Family Vacation / The Black Prince There are three feature films that form American Cinema International’s Runaway Romance collection: The Betrayal, The Revelation and The Restoration. These are based on a three-part book series, and a U.S. channel is on board as the commissioning broadcaster. The company is also presenting A Royal Family Vacation, which marks the third in a series of movies that also includes A Royal Feast and A Royal Family Christmas. “I am super excited about all the new films we have acquired for this MIPCOM,” says Chevonne O’Shaughnessy, the president of American Cinema International. “We have 15 new completed feature films that cover the entire spectrum of genres. We have something for everyone, from comedy to drama to even a historical epic called The Black Prince, which is a beautiful film.”
A Royal Family Christmas
“These titles provide what the markets are missing and require.” —Chevonne O’Shaughnessy
Applicaster ProSiebenSat.1 apps
Zapp app publishing platform ProSiebenSat.1, one of Europe’s largest broadcasters, recently launched six new channel apps using Applicaster’s app publishing platform, Zapp. “ProSieben joins customers such as RTL Netherlands, Mediaset, Televisa and other leading broadcasters around the world who use our platform to broadcast and monetize their content as well as engage users on their personal devices,” says Peter Cassidy, the general manager for Europe at Applicaster. The company also recently worked with BabyTV to introduce new features and layouts in the BabyTV Video App, which was designed with toddlers in mind. “Our app publishing Zapp platform revolutionizes the way apps are built, enabling broadcasters and other media companies to create unique, white-label apps with rich functionality in a matter of hours with no need for development work,” Cassidy says.
“Our message is ‘Apps Made Easy’—you can now easily and quickly launch and manage beautiful apps.” —Peter Cassidy 38 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Artist View Entertainment Chokehold / Z-Rex / Dead Draw Now in its 26th year of operations, Artist View Entertainment has a wide variety of films to offer, among them the female-driven MMA action thriller Chokehold. “The timing could not be better with Chokehold, as the world of professional female MMA is growing at an astounding rate,” says Scott Jones, the president of Artist View. “This inspirational Rocky-type story will cross over all platforms and many cultures.” Further highlights from the company include the creature feature Z-Rex and the suspense thriller Dead Draw. “Z-Rex is great fun and fits in nicely with the adventurous world of other creature and zombie films,” says Jones. He adds that the twist at the end of Dead Draw is “very clever, and the story overall will play in all areas of VOD and television.”
“It is our goal to provide clients with solid programming as we continue to follow the new trends and changes in the global marketplace.” —Scott Jones Chokehold
Astro Malaysia Didi & Friends Three chickens that sing nursery rhymes are at the center of the animated preschool series Didi & Friends, a co-production from Astro and Digital Durian. “Supported by a growing community of fans in Malaysia and around the region, Didi & Friends (the Bahasa-Malaysia version) is the top-rated preschool TV program in Malaysia,” says Hsu-Teik Goh, the senior assistant VP for animation and licensing at Astro Malaysia. “On YouTube alone it has garnered over 200 million views.” The English-language version of the show, which is available in both short and long form, will be presented at MIPJunior and is launching on YouTube. In addition to promoting Didi & Friends, Astro will be at the market looking for investment opportunities, “particularly in great animated content with the potential to travel in Asia and beyond,” says Goh.
“We are proud to announce the premiere of the English version of Didi & Friends in the MIPJunior screening rooms and on YouTube.” —Hsu-Teik Goh Didi & Friends
ATV Orphan Flowers / Bandits / Wedlock ATV lists the drama series Orphan Flowers among its bestselling titles and is looking to shore up further sales during MIPCOM. Another hit series from the ATV catalog is Bandits. Muhammed Ziyad Varol, who heads up sales at the company, believes the “incredible harmony of drama and action” in the series has contributed to its success. ATV is also presenting Wedlock, about a woman who is married to a famous brain surgeon. After her husband’s true character is revealed, she must decide whether to stay in the marriage or start a new life with her children. The drama She Was Pretty was broadcast this summer in Turkey to successful ratings, and ATV has high hopes that the series’ performance in its home territory will get the attention of international buyers.
“We’re looking forward to sharing our strong drama series and telling the international audience our success story.” —Muhammed Ziyad Varol Bandits 40 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Band Content Distribution The Breakupers / The Amazing Professor Ambrosius’ Mansion / Police 24H On offer from Band Content Distribution, the comedy series The Breakupers is about an agency in Rio de Janeiro that specializes in breaking up relationships. The company’s MIPCOM catalog also includes the animated kids’ series The Amazing Professor Ambrosius’ Mansion, which mixes educational entertainment and comedy, and the reality show Police 24H, spotlighting Brazilian police officers. “We are offering Brazilian productions with great diversity and style,” says Elisa Ayub, the company’s director of international content. “We are offering important titles that represent our diversity, including an educational cartoon available in three different languages, a brand-new comedy series and new episodes of Police 24H, our most famous reality show.”
“Companies are interested in innovation more than ever, and Band is offering the market exactly what it needs.” —Elisa Ayub The Amazing Professor Ambrosius’ Mansion
BBC Worldwide Planet Earth II / SS-GB / Class The first episode of Planet Earth II, which comes ten years after the original blue-chip series, will make its world premiere at MIPCOM as part of a special screening. “The team from the BBC’s Natural History Unit returns with new technology that allows them to get even closer to nature’s greatest wonders and reveal the planet from a completely new perspective,” says Paul Dempsey, the president of global markets at BBC Worldwide. “Add to that Sir David Attenborough’s worldwide popularity and we have a must-see factual series.” BBC Worldwide is also showcasing SS-GB, a thriller based on Len Deighton’s best-selling novel. Class, meanwhile, is set in the Doctor Who universe. The series come from writer Patrick Ness and is executive produced by Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin.
“SS-GB is utterly original and boasts an A-list cast.” —Paul Dempsey SS-GB
Beyond Distribution Fanshaw & Crudnut / Heavy Rescue: 401 / Carnival Eats The kids’ series Fanshaw & Crudnut, which Beyond Distribution will be presenting at MIPJunior, charts the lives of two badly behaving, bickering slugs from outer space. Munia Kanna-Konsek, the company’s head of sales, says the show is “the classic odd-couple story [with] dysfunctional characters that cannot be apart. Aimed at kids ages 6 to 10, it would sit perfectly on free-to-air or pan-satellite broadcasters.” Beyond Distribution’s MIPCOM slate also includes Heavy Rescue: 401, from the producers of the successful series Highway Thru Hell. The company also has three seasons of Carnival Eats, which looks at “mouth-watering and outrageous foods famously found at fairs and carnivals, the wacky characters who create them and the culinary thrill-seekers who devour and delight in them,” Kanna-Konsek says.
“We are actively seeking more content from up-and-coming producers to represent internationally.” —Munia Kanna-Konsek Heavy Rescue: 401 42 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Blue Ant International Collision Course / How the World Ends / I’ve Got Something to Tell You Each episode of Collision Course spotlights the scene of a car accident involving a celebrity. Blue Ant International is highlighting the title for MIPCOM, along with How the World Ends, which examines an impending timeline to global destruction, and I’ve Got Something to Tell You, a brand-new show in which ordinary people with extraordinary stories have conversations that often involve confessions. “These series are entertaining, relevant, relatable and highly promotable, across genres that have a track record of performing extremely well,” says Solange Attwood, the company’s senior VP of international. “With a mix of compelling and authentic stories of everyday people, confessional series as well as A-list celebrities in action-packed carcrash reenactments, these series all have universal appeal for our global buyers.”
“We promise to deliver bestin-class customer service and a reliable pipeline of premium content across all genres to our global buyers.” —Solange Attwood I’ve Got Something to Tell You
Calinos Entertainment Relationship Status: It’s Complicated / Emergency Love / Love, Just a Coincidence Calinos Entertainment is looking to notch up new international sales for the series Relationship Status: It’s Complicated and Emergency Love. Besir Tatli, the company’s general manager, notes that both titles are lighter and more optimistic in their tone than most dramas. He says they are more in the realm of romantic comedy, “which is a new and popular trend in Turkey.” The story in Relationship Status: It’s Complicated follows an aspiring scriptwriter whose life intersects with a handsome actor. “Relationship Status: It’s Complicated has been number one in the ratings since the first episode,” says Tatli. He believes that the movie Love, Just a Coincidence “has the potential to appeal to a large audience demographic as it has a universal story with characters that any viewer [can identify] with. It has been one of the most successful films at the Turkish box office.”
“Love, Just a Coincidence is a powerful yet lighthearted drama.” —Besir Tatli Love, Just a Coincidence
Canada Media Fund Funding / Research / Promotion of Canadian content The Canada Media Fund (CMF) is a private-public partnership created to support television and digital media production in Canada. “Through funding received by the government of Canada and Canada’s cable, satellite and IPTV distributors, the CMF can develop policies and funding programs that directly impact the country’s audiovisual production industry,” says Valerie Creighton, the organization’s president and CEO. Fostering new co-production opportunities is a focus for the CMF this year, according to Creighton. “As consumers have growing access to content from all corners of the world, the production community benefits greatly from working on the international front and sharing expertise, talent and access to markets. This is why we are developing and renewing partnerships with funding organizations similar to ours in countries around the world.”
“Developing new coproduction opportunities for Canadian producers continues to be a top priority.” —Valerie Creighton Versailles, a Canada-France co-pro with financing from the CMF 44 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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CBS Studios International MacGyver / Bull / Twin Peaks The action-adventure drama MacGyver recently premiered on CBS’s fall schedule and, thanks to CBS Studios International (CBSSI), international buyers can license this reimagining of an ’80s classic for their local territories. “MacGyver is a household name with a great legacy, so buyers will be excited to see this series rebooted for 2016,” says Barry Chamberlain, the president of sales at CBSSI. The series Bull also recently had its U.S. debut. “Bull is a fresh take on a legal drama with an internationally renowned lead actor, Michael Weatherly,” Chamberlain says. The return of Twin Peaks marks another highlight for CBSSI. “Twin Peaks struck a chord with viewers when it first premiered, so the whole world is looking forward to seeing David Lynch’s vision of the show 25 years later,” says Chamberlain.
“We continue to offer the best American content to the international marketplace.” —Barry Chamberlain Bull
Cisneros Media Distribution Mary for Mayor / Just Looking / The Sex Sense The dramedy Mary for Mayor, presented by Cisneros Media Distribution, is set in a fictional Southwestern town where divorce has been forbidden. When a resident named Mary finds herself unhappy in her marriage, she runs for mayor in an attempt to change the law. Cisneros Media Distribution is also highlighting the drama series Just Looking and The Sex Sense for buyers. “The diversity of these three programs exemplifies the evolution of our programming catalog, which has been completely renovated,” says Jonathan Blum, the president of Cisneros Media. “Mary for Mayor is simply a hilarious comedy series, while Just Looking is a dramatic series for all ages, showcasing a web of love in various stages, and The Sex Sense is an adult perspective on the desperation of maintaining the vitality of a relationship.”
“It’s a digital world, and we have become a digital entertainment content company.” —Jonathan Blum The Sex Sense
CJ E&M I Can See Your Voice / Grandpas Over Flowers / The Society Game Already commissioned in a number of territories, I Can See Your Voice is one of CJ E&M’s best-selling formats. “After its successful release and now armed with a tremendous track record worldwide, we are definitely looking forward to this format traveling more,” says Jin Woo Hwang, the company’s head of global format development. CJ E&M is also showcasing Grandpas Over Flowers, which has been successfully adapted as Better Late Than Never in the U.S. Small World IFT is distributing the format in Europe, while CJ E&M is handling Asian sales. There is also The Society Game, which is co-developed with Endemol Shine Group. “The format contains the highest level of creativity and production capability of the East and West,” says Hwang, who notes that Endemol Shine will be distributing the title worldwide.
“With our differentiated formats and stories, we believe Korean creativity has the potential to produce the next biggest hit.” —Jin Woo Hwang Grandpas Over Flowers 46 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Content Television Elián / Line of Duty / Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope Executive produced by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney, the 90-minute special Elián (working title) tells the story of Elián González, the 5-year-old Cuban boy rescued off the coast of Florida, and how the fight for his future changed the course of U.S.-Cuban relations. That title is among the factual highlights for Content Television, which is also presenting a drama slate that includes the fourth season of the BBC police thriller Line of Duty. The contemporary millennial drama Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope marks the first title to launch from Content’s exclusive first-look deal with Deadpan Pictures. The series “offers a fantastically fresh and distinctive character-driven story for prime-time schedules,” says Jonathan Ford, the executive VP of sales and distribution at Content Television.
“Our programming slate for MIPCOM delivers a host of brand-new titles with wide audience appeal.” —Jonathan Ford Line of Duty
dick clark productions international Fail Army / Now That’s Funny / Virtuosos The comedic unscripted series Fail Army, which is packed with bloopers, and Now That’s Funny, featuring viral videos, are two of the titles that dick clark productions (DCP) international will be speaking to buyers about at the market. “The unscripted comedy clip shows appeal to broadcasters worldwide because of the ability to customize according to territory,” says Bob Kennedy, the company’s senior VP of sales and acquisitions, highlighting the option to re-narrate, add graphics or a host. “Everyone can have fun with and relate to capturing laugh-outloud moments on video.” DCP international also has the format rights for Virtuosos, a talent show for classical musicians. The company’s catalog contains a number of annual awards shows, as DCP is producing the 74th Golden Globes, 44th Annual American Music Awards and 20th Hollywood Film Awards.
“DCP continues to offer the highest quality of programming, whether it’s our iconic live-event programming or our new non-scripted series and formats.” —Bob Kennedy Virtuosos
Dori Media Group Dumb / El Marginal / The Best of All In the comedic crime drama Dumb, an actress goes undercover as a high-school student to try to help her boyfriend who was arrested for dealing drugs. The series is part of Dori Media Group’s lineup of new shows for buyers, alongside the crime drama El Marginal. Among the formats on offer from the company is the new shiny-floor game show The Best of All. “The combination of examining the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ theory, the amusing video questions, the ‘wow factor’ and the option to play at home makes this new game show different and interesting—just what buyers are looking for,” says Nadav Palti, the president and CEO of Dori Media Group. Another highlight, the street game show Intuition, comes from the creator of the successful format Smart Face.
“Dumb is a strong comic crime drama with a story and characters that are international.” —Nadav Palti Dumb 48 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Dynamic Television Madiba / East Los High / Wynonna Earp Laurence Fishburne stars as Nelson Mandela in the sixhour event series Madiba, which Dynamic Television is presenting to buyers at MIPCOM. “The scope of the production brings a cinematic feel to this true-event series that will resonate with audiences around the world,” says Daniel March, managing partner at Dynamic. “We are also pleased to announce that Dynamic has acquired the international distribution rights for the hit Hulu original series East Los High,” he says. The five-time Emmy-nominated series follows the lives of a group of teens navigating their final years at a high school in East Los Angeles. Meanwhile, March describes the Syfy show Wynonna Earp as a “fun, actionpacked genre series with one of the noisiest fan bases of the season.” The show is based on a graphic novel.
“Not only is East Los High extremely addictive with its unique storytelling, it is also thoughtprovoking on a social level.” —Daniel March East Los High
Eccho Rights Insider / Wings of Love / Brave and Beautiful Eccho Rights has new titles to offer from the Turkish producer Ay Yapim, among them Insider, starring Çağatay Ulusoy. Also from Ay Yapim, Wings of Love is already off to a strong start with its ratings on FOX in Turkey. Meanwhile, Brave and Beautiful is a new drama on Turkey’s Star TV starring Tuba Büyüküstün and Kivanç Tatlituğ. “We have the top series from Turkey with the top actors—millions of people all around the world tune in to see these stars on a daily basis,” says Fredrik af Malmborg, the managing director of Eccho Rights. “We are also seeing new dramas produced in Western Europe based on very strong scripts that we represent.” The company’s MIPCOM slate also includes Flight HS13 from KRO-NCRV in the Netherlands and Sisters from TV4 in Sweden.
“Our job is to represent the world’s leading drama producers and give them the distribution service they deserve.” —Fredrik af Malmborg Insider
Electus International The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey / The Toybox / David Blaine specials The six-hour limited event The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey reexamines the unsolved murder of a 6-year-old beauty queen, 20 years after her tragic death. The series was produced for CBS, and Electus International also has new highlights from U.S. broadcaster ABC to offer. This includes The Toybox, which features expert toy makers as they compete for an opportunity to present their inventions to Mattel. Two new specials featuring David Blaine will mark the last of the performer’s career. “These are U.S. network titles that will have an incredible amount of buzz and hype around them, and we’re confident that the success they achieve in the U.S. will translate to markets all over the globe,” says John Pollak, the president of global distribution and Electus Studios at Electus International.
“With each of these series, we’re not only bringing emotion to the screen but also incredibly high production values.” —John Pollak David Blaine specials 50 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Entertainment One Television International Conviction / Cardinal / Ransom The legal drama Conviction just debuted on ABC in the U.S., and Entertainment One (eOne) Television International will be offering up the series for international buyers. “From The Mark Gordon Company and ABC Studios, the provocative network drama Conviction revolves around a strong ensemble cast featured in an investigative procedural, which is a hugely popular genre that plays well globally,” says Stuart Baxter, the president of eOne Television International. The eOne slate also features Cardinal, adapted from the novel Forty Words for Sorrow, which is the first of the John Cardinal Mysteries series, and Ransom, following a crisis and hostage negotiator. “The caliber of talent in front of and behind the camera on all three series is exceptionally paired with strong writing and three-dimensional, layered characters that are truly compelling,” says Baxter.
“We are anticipating this to be our biggest MIPCOM yet, as we’re heading to the market with an unprecedented number of new launches.” —Stuart Baxter Conviction
FINAS Animated projects / Formats / Factual programming The National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (FINAS), which works to promote the country’s audiovisual sector, is coming to MIPCOM to help further the footprint of content made in Malaysia. Among the core genres being presented by Malaysian companies at the market are formats and factual programming, according to Dato’ Mohid Mohamed, the deputy secretary general (policy) for the Ministry of Communication and Multimedia Malaysia. From Big Tent Entertainment comes Ajatika, a documentary that highlights places, people and cultures threatened by environmental change and globalization pressure. Global Station, meanwhile, is showcasing Papi Ricky, about a young divorcé and father who has a love for sports. Malaysian companies such as Animasia Studio, Kartun Studios and Inphase Media will also be presenting new content.
“We will continue our effort to support animation projects, outsourcing opportunities and location shooting.” —Dato' Mohid Mohamed Animasia Studio’s Harry & Bunnie
FremantleMedia International Apple Tree Yard / The Heart Guy / Jamie’s Super Food Family Classics A married woman on trial for murder after having a passionate affair is the main character in Apple Tree Yard, one of FremantleMedia International’s (FMI) MIPCOM highlights. “Apple Tree Yard is a provocative and intelligent drama from Kudos, based on Louise Doughty’s best-selling book,” says Jens Richter, FMI’s CEO. Also on offer is The Heart Guy, about a former cardiac surgeon who is forced to work as a general practitioner in his hometown. “The Heart Guy is a fantastic watch,” says Richter. “The characters and family relationships are very relatable.” Then there is Jamie’s Super Food Family Classics, which sees Jamie Oliver freshen up classic family recipes. “This series is sure to inspire everyone from novice to expert home cooks to try something new in the kitchen,” says Richter.
“Our MIPCOM slate perfectly demonstrates our ongoing strategy to work with the best in the business.” —Jens Richter The Heart Guy 52 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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GMA Worldwide Someone to Watch Over Me / Ysabel / Encantadia The message in GMA Worldwide’s family drama Someone to Watch Over Me is that true love can endure through anything. The series portrays the hardship of a wife caring for her husband afflicted with advanced Alzheimer’s. Another GMA Worldwide highlight, Ysabel, shows the struggle of a surrogate mother who flees with the unborn baby after her own child dies in an accident. “The story highlights the power of the human spirit,” says Roxanne J. Barcelona, the VP of GMA Worldwide. Meanwhile, Encantadia is an epic fantasy about the battle among four sisters and a kingdom’s war against evil. “The appeal of GMA programs stems from their engaging plot lines and interesting characters,” Barcelona says. “The programs are empowering for men and women, young and old.”
“Each story conveys universal themes like love and fortitude in a unique Philippine setting.” —Roxanne J. Barcelona Ysabel
GRB Entertainment WALT: The Man Behind the Myth / Occult Crimes / Cleveland Hustles GRB Entertainment’s WALT: The Man Behind the Myth is the authorized story of how this icon created his entertainment empire and is presented by his daughter Diane Disney Miller. The company is also showcasing the investigative series Occult Crimes. “There is an ever-increasing appetite for programs in the crime-and-investigation space and buyers are always looking for a new spin on the genre,” says Michael Lolato, GRB’s senior VP of international distribution. “Occult Crimes brings in the element of satanic/paranormal activity and the crimes that are committed within these circles.” In Cleveland Hustles, NBA superstar LeBron James and his longtime friend and business partner Maverick Carter give four aspiring local entrepreneurs the chance to realize their dreams while also helping to revitalize a Cleveland neighborhood.
“We have a fascinating slate of new programs in the genres of crime, factual, lifestyle and scripted.” —Michael Lolato Occult Crimes
Incendo Serialized / FANatic / Divorce Court Incendo has new telefilms on offer at MIPCOM, including Serialized, starring Vanessa Ray (Blue Bloods, Pretty Little Liars) and directed by Michel Poulette (Brace for Impact). Also in the TV-movie genre is FANatic, featuring Betsy Brandt (Breaking Bad, Life in Pieces). FANatic is directed by filmmaker Jean-François Rivard (Série Noire I-II, Les Invicibles I-II-III). The Incendo catalog additionally includes 460 episodes of the long-running courtroom reality series Divorce Court, led by Judge Lynn Toler. “Incendo is known for quality,” says Gavin Reardon, the head of international sales and co-productions at Incendo. “The buyers know they’re working with a reliable company with a history of delivering successful programming, from the series Versailles to the 60-plus TV movies it has produced over the last 16 years and now Divorce Court.”
“As we have for the last 16 years, we are here to develop and expand our relationships with our friends and clients around the world.” —Gavin Reardon Divorce Court 54 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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ITV Inter Medya Hayat / Endless Love / Join Instant A young woman falls in love with the handsome Murat and everything gets out of hand in the drama series Hayat. ITV Inter Medya is showcasing Hayat at MIPCOM, alongside the drama Endless Love. Produced by Ay Yapim, Endless Love is the story of Nihan and Kemal, who fall for each other despite the fact that they come from different social classes. Can Okan, ITV Inter Medya’s president and CEO, calls Endless Love “one of our most important projects that we will be taking to MIPCOM, in addition to Hayat, our brand-new title in the catalog, and In Between, one of our most successful dramas.” The company is also promoting its growing formats slate, which features the online interactive game show Join Instant.
“The production quality of our titles is worldclass, and the strength of their stories is quite well accepted worldwide.” —Can Okan Hayat
ITV Studios Global Entertainment Cold Feet / Meet the Parents / Prime Suspect: Tennison More than a decade after the original series concluded, the popular dramedy Cold Feet is being brought back, and ITV Studios Global Entertainment (ITVS GE) is offering up the show. “We’re revisiting our cast of lovable characters at a very different time in their lives,” says Ruth Berry, the company’s managing director. “They’re in their late 40s/early 50s and facing a world of new challenges.” Another highlight is Meet the Parents, a new format that asks a single person to judge three potential dates based on conversations with each of their parents. Also being promoted by ITVS GE at MIPCOM is Prime Suspect: Tennison, the prequel to the hit drama Prime Suspect. “There’s been a lot of anticipation for this one,” says Berry. “It’s a meaty crime series with a fantastic protagonist in Detective Jane Tennison.”
“Our investment in content and acquisitions in recent years is paying off; our pipeline continues to grow in terms of volume, breadth and geography.” —Ruth Berry Cold Feet
Legendary Television Distribution Colony / The Looming Tower / Downward Dog With the strong ratings and critical acclaim for season one of Colony, Legendary Television Distribution has high hopes for the second season of the Carlton Cuse-produced drama series. “Season two will focus more on the science-fiction aspect of the story lines, which worldwide audiences have clamored for,” says Michael Grindon, the president of worldwide distribution at Legendary Television & Digital Media. Meanwhile, the new one-hour drama The Looming Tower, ordered by Hulu, chronicles the rising threat of Osama bin Laden and AlQaeda and takes a controversial look at how the rivalry between the CIA and FBI might have inadvertently set the stage for 9/11 and the war in Iraq. The series is executive produced by the award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. A mid-season series for ABC, Downward Dog caps off the slate.
“Legendary Television Distribution will continue to bring buyers an ever-increasing number of series and other formats for television and digital platforms everywhere.” —Michael Grindon Downward Dog
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Lionsgate Entertainment Graves / Nightcap / Kicking & Screaming The single-camera comedy Graves, which Lionsgate Entertainment is presenting for buyers, stars Nick Nolte as a former two-term U.S. president who embarks on a quest to right the wrongs of his administration. Sela Ward plays his wife and the former first lady who decides it’s time for her to pursue her own political ambitions. Also from Lionsgate, Nightcap takes viewers into the fast-paced world of a fictional late-night talk show. “This irreverent show features Staci, the frazzled producer, played by Ali Wentworth, and a mixed cast of improvisational actors and real-life celebrity guests,” says Peter Iacono, the president of international television and digital distribution at Lionsgate. The company is also presenting the competition series Kicking & Screaming, which sees expert survivalists paired with pampered partners to face tough challenges.
“Nightcap is an edgy, smart comedy that clearly demonstrates that the production of a live TV chat show is not as smooth behind the scenes as it may first appear.” —Peter Iacono Nightcap
MarVista Entertainment Cold Zone / One of Us / Summer Villa MarVista Entertainment is in Cannes with a slate that runs the gamut from romantic comedy to mystery to disaster. Cold Zone is the story of a scientist who sees signs of an impending flash-freeze storm while vacationing in Alaska. Another MIPCOM highlight is the thriller One of Us, about an investigative journalist who questions her sanity when she is asked to expose the charismatic leader of a commune that only recruits young women. There is also the romantic comedy Summer Villa, which MarVista produced for Hallmark Channel. “These movies appeal to buyers for the same reason they appeal to the escapist sensibilities of the viewers: the stories are captivating and the characters are endearing and aspirational,” says Vanessa Shapiro, MarVista Entertainment’s executive VP of distribution.
“We produce, acquire and distribute quality entertainment content that appeals to a broad cross section of the global viewing audience.” —Vanessa Shapiro Summer Villa
Miramax New film & TV content / Miramax library / Revolution Studios library The latest projects in the Miramax catalog feature “stars and stories that resonate with audiences worldwide,” says Joe Patrick, the company’s executive VP of worldwide television sales and home entertainment. He cites as examples Southside with You, inspired by the first date of Michelle and Barack Obama; Bridget Jones’s Baby, which marks the next chapter in the beloved franchise; The 9th Life of Louis Drax, based on an international best seller; and Bad Santa 2, featuring the holiday return of raucous Willie Soke. On the TV side, From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, based on the cult classic film, is now in its third season in the U.S. The catalog is also home to Miramax, Revolution Studios, Samuel Goldwyn and Woodfall Films libraries, which cover everything from comedy to action, drama and horror.
“We are actively working to grow both our film and TV pipelines with quality content to complement our acclaimed library.” —Joe Patrick From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series 56 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Multicom Entertainment Group Larry King Now / Ora.TV / Blood Is Blood The Multicom Entertainment Group catalog is home to Larry King Now, featuring the iconic host as he interviews athletes, entrepreneurs, celebrities, world leaders and musicians. Multicom is also now distributing Ora.TV’s library of hit series, among them Politicking with Larry King, William Shatner’s Brown Bag Wine Tasting, The Rubin Report and other celebrity-driven factual content. “Multicom’s latest release, Blood Is Blood, is available on digital HD and VOD everywhere,” adds Darrin Holender, the company’s president. “Multicom will be shopping it to worldwide buyers at this year’s MIPCOM.” Fiona Dourif stars in the thriller as Brie, whose visions of her murderous brother begin to blur the lines between hallucination and reality. Brie becomes trapped in a struggle for both her sanity and her life.
“Multicom has exponentially grown every year, taking on library after library.” —Darrin Holender Larry King Now
Muse Distribution International The Kennedys: After Camelot / Bellevue / Fixer-Upper Mysteries A sequel to the four-time Emmy Award-winning miniseries The Kennedys, The Kennedys: After Camelot stars Katie Holmes as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Matthew Perry as Ted Kennedy. Muse Distribution International is highlighting the event miniseries on its MIPCOM slate, which also features the drama series Bellevue, starring Anna Paquin (True Blood). The Muse portfolio also includes Fixer-Upper Mysteries, starring Jewel and based on the novels by New York Times best-selling author Kate Carlisle. “Muse’s movies, like Fixer-Upper Mysteries, are well received internationally because they continue to fill an appetite for quality murdermystery movies without being too dark and without the risk of censorship,” says Shawn Rosengarten, the company’s VP of distribution.
“A television event like The Kennedys: After Camelot has global appeal across all platforms due to its high production value, star power and riveting subject matter.” —Shawn Rosengarten The Kennedys: After Camelot
NBCUniversal International Distribution Jamestown / Eyewitness / Pure Genius From Downton Abbey producer Carnival Films comes Jamestown, which tells the story of the first British settlers in North America. NBCUniversal International Distribution is featuring the title alongside Eyewitness, an adaptation of a Norwegian thriller. “Buyers looking to offer binge-worthy content to their viewers will gravitate toward Eyewitness,” says Belinda Menendez, the president of NBCUniversal International Distribution and Networks. The company will also present Pure Genius, a medical drama from Jason Katims (Parenthood, Friday Night Lights). “Each of these series has characteristics that tend to be universally embraced by international buyers: top-notch talent (both in front of and behind the camera), strong writing, compelling characters, intriguing story lines and high production values,” says Menendez.
“We look forward to the expansion of our portfolio of content via the recently completed DreamWorks acquisition.” —Belinda Menendez Jamestown 58 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Newen Distribution OURO / Terror Studios / Truth or Dare Selected as one of the MIPCOM International Drama Screenings, OURO is a modern-day adventure series about a French geology student on the trail of gold in the Amazon jungle. The eight-part series is on offer from Newen Distribution. The company is also showcasing the big-budget documentary Terror Studios, which investigates how ISIS is using popculture codes in their propaganda. “OURO and Terror Studios are both Canal+ originals that are coming out after the worldwide successes of Spiral, The Returned and Versailles,” says Julien Leroux, Newen’s deputy managing director. “International audiences know what quality they can expect.” Leroux adds that the company is also looking forward to speaking with international buyers about the celebrity-based unscripted format Truth or Dare, which currently airs on TF1 in France.
“Newen is growing bigger every market.” —Julien Leroux OURO
Next Animation Studio Karen Senki: The Movie Next Animation Studio (NAS) presents Karen Senki: The Movie, a feature-length animated science-fiction and action film. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the story follows Karen Senki, humanity’s last hope in the battle against robot oppressors. “Karen Senki is a strong female lead with universal appeal,” says Indra Suharjono, the CEO of NAS. “She is driven to save the world through her courage, determination and love for her younger sister, Touka. With the rise in strong female characters in books, movies and popular culture, Karen Senki is the heroine boys and girls and audiences everywhere need now.” Suharjono adds, “With over 20 years in the kids’ entertainment and animation business, executive producer Rich Magallanes will oversee development and production, ensuring an entertaining and gripping story with strong, relatable characters.”
“Our full-service animation capabilities, combined with our IP strengths, make NAS a compelling partner for buyers.” —Indra Suharjono Karen Senki: The Movie
Nippon TV Burning Questions! / The Animakers / Your Home is My Business! The latest formats to come from Nippon TV include Burning Questions! and The Animakers. The two formats have contrasting appeal, according to Shigeko “Cindy” Chino, the company’s senior director of international business development. “Burning Questions!, being a classic studio game show with universal appeal, depicts the timeless challenge to sway players into believing what could be the truth,” she explains. “On the other hand, The Animakers, a futuristic and innovative show, showcases cutting-edge Japanimation technology.” There are also scripted formats on offer from the company, including Your Home is My Business! The series follows a businesswoman dedicated to satisfying her clients’ needs beyond their expectations. “This drama brings to mind the fundamentals of business and human relations,” says Chino.
“From West to East, we aim to reach out to buyers with the best in Japanese television.” —Shigeko “Cindy” Chino The Animakers 60 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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ORF-Enterprise Giants of the Atlantic: Azores / Suburbia: Women on the Edge / Awesome Animals From ORF’s Universum strand comes the Ultra HD 4K factual highlight Giants of the Atlantic: Azores. “With exceptional stories and enthralling adventures of wild animals showing their abilities and characteristics, ORF Universum is a renowned producer of blue-chip documentaries,” says Marion CamusOberdorfer, the head of international content sales at ORFEnterprise. The company also has a new season of the comedy Suburbia: Women on the Edge, which is one of ORF’s highestrated series. A new highlight is the kids’ edutainment series Awesome Animals, hosted by the puppet Tomcat Kurt. “ORF also has a long tradition as a producer of edutainment programming for the younger audiences,” says Camus-Oberdorfer. “We’re proud to be carrying on our market position with this new wildlife show for kids.”
“We are looking forward to a challenging market and will keep up our high standards of quality in all genres with our latest program lineup.” —Marion Camus-Oberdorfer Giants of the Atlantic: Azores
Passion Distribution The Next Great Magician / The Dressing Room / Rich Kids of Social Media Passion Distribution is offering the 6x1-hour finished series and format rights for The Next Great Magician. “Magic is forever popular at a global level,” says Elin Thomas, Passion’s director of global sales. “The Next Great Magician is an unmissable, prime-time family entertainment format where the most talented magicians perform incredible illusions in a bid to win their own TV special.” Passion Distribution also has in its portfolio The Dressing Room, which looks at how sporting teammates interact in the heat of the moment. “It’s a unique insight into the way we relate to people during our most highly charged moments,” Thomas says. Meanwhile, the world of the ultra-wealthy is the focus of Rich Kids of Social Media, which spotlights characters who are “larger than life and living the dream,” says Thomas.
“Our slate of new entertainment series will appeal to audiences of all demographics across international markets.” —Elin Thomas The Next Great Magician
Portfolio Entertainment Freaktown / Do You Know? / The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! YouTube sensation Maddie Moate leads the live-action factual series Do You Know?, a preschool show that Portfolio Entertainment is highlighting. The company also has the animated highlights Freaktown and The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!, which has a new season available. “Buyers keep coming back for more of The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! and Portfolio is now in production on a third season of 20 new half-hour episodes,” says Jonathan Abraham, Portfolio’s director of international sales and acquisitions. “The Dr. Seuss brand is one that preschoolers and parents trust, and The Cat is a beloved character whose riddles and rhymes continue to captivate [audiences] in over 110 countries around the world.” In the comedy Freaktown, viewers follow Ben Bones and his freaky friends on adventures.
“Portfolio’s reputation is built on the ability to identify and build brands and original ideas that resonate with audiences of all ages.” —Jonathan Abraham Do You Know? 62 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Pure Flix/Quality Flix Encounter / Hitting the Breaks / I’m Not Ashamed The Pure Flix movie Encounter has inspired a new 10x30minute series of the same name. “The mysterious tone, similar to The Twilight Zone, with an inspirational message will resonate around the world,” says Ron Gell, the VP of international sales and distribution at Pure Flix/Quality Flix. In the 10x30-minute Hitting the Breaks, an ex-racecar driver moves his family from a big city to the remote Rocky Mountains when he inherits The Serenity Inn. Gell says that Hitting the Breaks is a “comedy series the whole family can enjoy.” The company is also promoting the theatrical feature film I’m Not Ashamed, which tells the story of Rachel Joy Scott, who was the first student to die in the Columbine High School shootings of 1999. Another highlight is Do You Believe?, an ensemble drama feature.
“Our objective is to establish relationships with top distribution companies and broadcasters directly in all territories.” —Ron Gell Do You Believe?
Scripps Networks Interactive Food Network / Travel Channel / HGTV Scripps Networks Interactive distributes a portfolio of eight lifestyle channel brands across the globe, led by the flagship offerings Food Network, Travel Channel and HGTV. “Food Network is a unique lifestyle network that connects viewers to the power and joy of food,” says Derek Chang, the head of international lifestyle channels at Scripps Networks Interactive. Chang says that increasing distribution for Food Network across Latin America is a key growth area. Travel Channel is available in nearly 160 million households across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia Pacific, while HGTV is present in more than 40 countries outside the U.S. “Since its launch in 1994, HGTV has established itself as a top 10 network in all of cable in the U.S., and we are now focused on the international expansion of the brand,” says Chang.
“A key element of our localization strategy is investing in local programming.” —Derek Chang Paul Hollywood City Bakes on Food Network
Sky Vision Riviera / Britannia / Ross Kemp Extreme World A morally ambiguous character is at the center of Riviera, an emotionally driven drama that Sky Vision is presenting at the market. “It is based in the opulent world of the ultra-rich and set against the stunning backdrop of the sun-drenched South of France,” says Jane Millichip, the company’s managing director. Sky Vision’s slate also includes Britannia, a period drama in which the Roman Imperial Army is fighting against a mysterious land ruled by wild warrior women and powerful druids. The series is filming on location in Prague and Wales. It is due to debut on Sky 1 in the U.K. and Ireland, and will become available on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S. next year. Also on offer is the fifth season of the docuseries Ross Kemp Extreme World.
“While factual programming remains core to the business, we now represent significant global entertainment and drama franchises.” —Jane Millichip Ross Kemp Extreme World 64 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Smilehood Media Cooking at the Supermarket / Ultimatum / Hosts Capitalizing on the food craze, the game-show format Cooking at the Supermarket is set inside a grocery store. The format has already proven popular across Latin America, and Smilehood Media is presenting the title to international buyers at MIPCOM. The company also presents the dramedy Ultimatum. “At MIPCOM, we’ll be showcasing new fiction and entertainment formats, such as Alchemy for Ana, a wonderful comedy about a talented artist who one day abruptly assumes the role of a mother after the death of her best friend,” says Silvana D’Angelo, the managing director of Smilehood Media. Another highlight from the company is Hosts, about the owner of a small entertainment company who’s determined to save his business.
“We have content for every platform and we try to quickly understand changes in the market and offer what audiences want on each screen.” —Silvana D’Angelo Hosts
Smithsonian Channel The Real Jesus of Nazareth / Sacred Sites Smithsonian Channel is at MIPCOM looking for co-production partners as well as acquisitions. “Our viewers expect us to provide an entertaining and thought-provoking alternative to much of the reality-type programming that dominates nonfiction television today,” says David Royle, the executive VP of programming and production. “We’re both producing and looking for programming that features dramatic storytelling and new insights, and also has integrity.” Among the channel’s highlights are The Real Jesus of Nazareth, which celebrates the 40th anniversary of the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. “We’re also very excited about Sacred Sites, which is a beautifully filmed and crafted six-part series on the world’s most remarkable and mysterious religious locations,” says Royle.
“We were one of the first allHD channels, and the transition to 4K/UHD is a natural evolution for us.” —David Royle Sacred Sites
SOMOS Distribution 39 and a Half / Sunshine Girl / Matter of Respect The dramedy 39 and a Half, which aired on Poland’s TVN, and the dramas Sunshine Girl and Matter of Respect, from Turkey’s Kanal D, lead off the slate for SOMOS Distribution. The company also has in its catalog Hasta que te Conocí, which narrates the life of the Mexican singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel. Luis Villanueva, the company’s president and CEO, says that these titles are sure to entice international buyers with their “excellent production values, attractive casting and appealing stories.” He adds that the company has a track record of “selecting the most attractive and nonconventional content, besides our standard offering, based on our knowledge of the audience and the needs of our clients. That is why we have been able to help our partners [enter] new territories and increase sales in a globalized environment.”
“We can provide game-changing content and fortify or improve competitiveness in this dynamic industry.” —Luis Villanueva Matter of Respect 66 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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Sonar Entertainment Taboo / The Son / The Shannara Chronicles Tom Hardy stars in the eight-part Taboo, one of Sonar Entertainment’s top titles for MIPCOM. The series is set in 1814 London and is executive produced by Ridley Scott for FX and BBC One. Also part of the Sonar slate is The Son, a 10x1-hour drama taking place in 20th-century America and starring Pierce Brosnan for AMC. The Shannara Chronicles, meanwhile, is a fantasy series for MTV that is set centuries into Earth’s post-apocalyptic future. The show, which was recently renewed for a second season, is adapted from Terry Brooks’ best-selling novels. “Aside from the theatrical-level production quality and world-renowned talent, our series dive into universal topics such as family, love, revenge, land and coming of age,” says David Ellender, Sonar’s president of global distribution and co-productions.
“We look forward to meeting with buyers to introduce our expanded sales team and share our variety of content offerings.” —David Ellender The Shannara Chronicles
Starz Worldwide Distribution Destruction: Los Angeles / A ChristmasBroadcast / My Summer Prince The slate of TV movies from Starz Worldwide Distribution spans genres such as action and disaster, thrillers and holiday films, with highlights that include Destruction: Los Angeles, A Christmas Broadcast and My Summer Prince. Gene George, the company’s executive VP of worldwide distribution, says that the telefilms are “very targeted for broadcasters and fill certain slots for them, and historically have been top performers for us with our buyers.” He adds, “Starz is a company that delivers unique, compelling and groundbreaking entertainment…. And because Starz Worldwide is directly part of the network in the U.S., we can provide a level of support to our partners that is unparalleled in the business.” George reinforces that it is the company’s mission to “support our partners above and beyond to enable them to succeed with Starz content.”
“Starz continues to raise its profile as one of the most important suppliers of television content in the marketplace.” —Gene George My Summer Prince
Storybox Entertainment Summer Love / Love on a Limb / Christmas Cookies In the 90-minute romantic comedy/drama Summer Love, a single mom goes back to college and accepts an internship at a tech company, where she soon finds two handsome executives competing for her love. Storybox Entertainment is presenting the title among a slate of features that also includes Love on a Limb, about a town’s beloved oak tree that brings together two unsuspecting people. The holiday movie Christmas Cookies tells the story of a high-powered executive on a mission to buy a small-town cookie factory so she can return to her city life before the dreaded Christmas season. Francisco J. González, the head of international at Storybox Entertainment, says these movies have “original stories with universal and relatable themes, great production values and top-notch casts.”
“With over 20 new titles, we continue our commitment to bringing original, top-quality entertainment to the marketplace for all audiences.” —Francisco J. González Christmas Cookies 68 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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STUDIOCANAL Midnight Sun / Below the Surface / Crazyhead The high-concept thriller Midnight Sun comes from the directing duo Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, creators of Bron/Broen. STUDIOCANAL is highlighting the title, alongside Below the Surface, a crime thriller from Denmark. The company is also presenting the comedic horror series Crazyhead, from the creator of Misfits, Howard Overman. The six-part series is being produced by Urban Myth Films for Channel 4 in association with Netflix. “As the demand for well-written drama series with high-end production values and universal appeal continues around the world, we are delighted to have these three exceptional new dramas available to launch at MIPCOM,” says Katrina Neylon, the executive VP of sales and marketing at STUDIOCANAL. “They are each authentic and relevant, with themes that reflect our lives today.”
“With gripping story lines and unique locations, these series will captivate and intrigue viewers from the very start.” —Katrina Neylon Midnight Sun
Telefe Love After Love / Educating Nina / The Return of Lucas The friendship between two married couples turns out to be the prelude to a forbidden romance in the Telefe telenovela Love After Love. The series, which will launch on Telefe in 2017, is being filmed using 4K technology. The comedy Educating Nina, produced by Telefe and Underground, debuted in Argentina in April in prime time and has been a leader in its time slot. It tells the story of twin sisters, Nina and Mara, who were separated at birth. Mara grows up surrounded by luxury, while Nina is a dancer and back-up singer. Their lives radically change when Nina is forced to live her sister’s life. A coproduction between Telefe and América TV, The Return of Lucas was shot on location in Peru, also using 4K filming technology.
Educating Nina
Televisa Internacional The Three Sides of Ana / My Next Me / Domus Years after a tragic accident separated Ana Lucía from her sisters, the search for her continues in The Three Sides of Ana, which Televisa Internacional is presenting to international buyers. While Ana Laura longs to find her sister, Ana Leticia will stop at nothing to hinder the search. The talent show My Next Me, another MIPCOM highlight, sees three stars seek out talented young contestants to help launch their music careers. Throughout the process, the stars relive various stages of their own careers and bond with the up-and-coming performers. Domus, meanwhile, is a reality show that combines outdoor and indoor survival challenges, subjecting 16 men and women to conditions similar to those on Mars in order to find the most extreme survivor worthy of inhabiting the Red Planet.
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Terra Mater Factual Studios Nature’s Greatest Talents / Wild Winners / Back from the Brink: Saving the King’s Horses Two three-part miniseries are at the top of Terra Mater Factual Studios’ highlights. Nature’s Greatest Talents shines a light on the topics of smartness, camouflage and seduction within the animal kingdom, while Wild Winners puts a focus on three types of animals: wild cats, birds and primates. The company also has the special Back from the Brink: Saving the King’s Horses, which focuses on the Trakehner horse breed. “A huge number of channels air natural-history and science programs in very prominent slots or even dedicate their whole output to these genres, so there’s an unbroken demand for high-quality content in the international market,” says Sabine Holzer, Terra Mater’s head of TV. “Making use of new technologies, working with unusual perspectives and finding new angles of storytelling, we’re providing cutting-edge docs for the market.”
“Our films captivate [viewers] with compelling stories and stunning visuals.” —Sabine Holzer Wild Winners
Tricon Films & Television Food’s Greatest Hits / Unchained / All American Wheels Viewers will learn an abundance about different types of eats in Food’s Greatest Hits. The series is part of Tricon Films & Television’s offering at MIPCOM. Andrea Gorfolova, the company’s president, says the show is “about food, fun facts and the people who took these classics and made them a part of our collective identity.” In Unchained, viewers are exposed to the history of motocross, from its beginnings through to its present popularity. Wheels Through Time Museum’s curator, Dale Walksler, hosts All American Wheels, another highlight from Tricon. The program takes audiences on a quest through America’s barns and backyards for vintage motorcycles that Walksler brings back to life for his museum or to sell at auction. Alongside factual, the company offers a scripted slate that includes the drama Forgive Me and dramedy Sensitive Skin.
“The demand for lifestyle programming, specifically in the areas of food, real estate, travel and hobbies, has been increasing.” —Andrea Gorfolova All American Wheels
TRX www.trx.tv The TRX online trading system allows buyers and sellers to transact “quickly, simply and efficiently,” according to Matthew Frank, the company’s CEO. “Buyers can search, view and then buy content from a huge range of distributors all in one place, while sellers can offer their entire catalog and reach all buyers wherever they are, all of the time.” TRX is currently live in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, and there are plans to have all territories open for business by the end of the year. “There are over 10,000 hours of content available now from some of the world’s leading distributors, and this increases every day,” Frank says. “We are currently developing new features in the system, including the ability to do package and multi-territory deals, which will be available in the next few months.”
“TRX is simple and easy to use and brings a much-needed efficiency and streamlining to the buying-and-selling process.” —Matthew Frank
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Turner Good Behavior / Will Turner’s TNT has been shifting its slate of original programming toward bold and cinematic dramas. This fall, for example, sees the premiere of Good Behavior, featuring Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery as a thief and con artist. Following in 2017 is Will, an unconventional period drama centered on a young William Shakespeare and set to a contemporary soundtrack. “Turner U.S. and Turner International will be co-producing several new series a year—this also includes TBS and truTV scripted comedy output—and steadily enlarging our vibrant development pipeline,” says Hannes Heyelmann, the senior VP of international original programming strategy at Turner. “We are excited about premiering these new shows on our own networks as well as finding the best destinations for them on other channels and platforms.”
“We believe that our audiences will love this new direction of TNT defined by distinctive dramas and immersive stories.” —Hannes Heyelmann Good Behavior
TV Azteca International/AZ Content Among Us /Any Given Day /What Women Keep in Silence One of the titles being promoted by TV Azteca International/ AZ Content is Among Us, a drama about people with faith in divine justice. There is also Any Given Day, which invites viewers to decide which story out of three is fabricated and which are real. Another highlight is What Women Keep in Silence, a drama exploring the challenges that females must confront in their everyday lives, including family conflicts, violence, addiction, disease and disability. Other titles on the MIPCOM slate for TV Azteca International/AZ Content are Living to Race, an action drama about a man who competes in dangerous races to pay for his sister’s medical treatments; Lucha Azteca, which covers the best in Mexican wrestling folklore; and Box Azteca, spotlighting the most exciting moments in the history of world championship fights.
Any Given Day
Voxx Studios Language dubbing /Automated dialogue replacement / Voice over The Los Angeles-based audio and video postproduction facility Voxx Studios specializes in language dubbing, automated dialogue replacement and voice over. “Our company operates ten recording studios and four mixing bays and is owned and run by experienced film and TV producers who truly understand our clients’ expectations for quality and timely deliveries,” says Silviu Epure, the company’s general manager. “Our professional actors and staff members are drawn straight from the heart of Hollywood, the center stage for acting and the recording industry in the U.S. This ultimately allows us to provide quality services in a multitude of languages, from Spanish to Hebrew to English, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, French, Mandarin or Farsi.” Voxx recently expanded its neutral Japanese and Italian cast base and “is ready to take on any project,” says Epure.
“Voxx Studios has the right voice for every language.” —Silviu Epure Voxx Studios’ facilities 74 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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ZDF Enterprises The Desert Sea / The Fall / 4 for Family—The Big Family Competition The natural-history series The Desert Sea is on offer from the ZDFE.factual division of ZDF Enterprises (ZDFE). The twoparter focuses on the Sonoran Desert in North America and the wild animals that live there. From the ZDFE.drama slate comes the third season of the hit crime drama The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson and Jamie Dornan. ZDFE.entertainment is highlighting the game-show format 4 for Family—The Big Family Competition, while the ZDFE.junior catalog includes the animated preschool series Inui. “Whether it is for classic TV, internet TV, VOD or multimedia content, we have a broad spectrum of programs that keeps drawing both buyers and content providers to us for material, advice and ideas,” says Fred Burcksen, ZDFE’s executive VP and COO. “And, of course, we are always looking for exciting content to invest in.”
“Whoever is looking for topnotch content will find it in ZDF Enterprises’ four genres: drama, factual, junior and entertainment.” —Fred Burcksen The Fall
Zee Entertainment Enterprises Dance India Dance / Hum Paanch / Phantasmagoria A major focus for Zee Entertainment Enterprises is on gaining further traction with its formats, both scripted and unscripted. The company’s catalog includes Dance India Dance, a competition series that has had versions in Singapore and Thailand, and Moksha, a game show requiring strategy, luck and skill. “We have researched and reviewed our bank of format concepts and existing Zee scripted programs to see which would fit best as formats,” says Sunita Uchil, the company’s chief business officer for international ad sales, global syndication and production. “Also, we have received great interest from our global partners for these formats.” In scripted, Zee has the family sitcoms Hum Paanch and Kareena Kareena, as well as the crime drama The Eclipse Harvest and Phantasmagoria, a set of twisted short stories.
“We continue to live and deliver on our mission statement: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam— The World is My Family.” —Sunita Uchil Phantasmagoria
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s a young girl, Jennifer Lopez dreamed of being a performer. Over the course of her multifaceted career she has been a dancer, singer, actress, mentor and executive producer. Her company Nuyorican Productions has established a roster of TV and film credits, including Shades of Blue, which airs on NBC. Lopez plays Detective Harlee Santos opposite Ray Liotta as Lieutenant Matt Wozniak, who often leads his team to operate outside of the law. During one illegal job, Santos is caught by the FBI and turned informant. Lopez talks to World Screen about this intriguing, complex character, her role as executive producer and her By Anna Carugati philanthropic initiatives.
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WS: How did you first hear about Shades of Blue? LOPEZ: My producing partner had been developing it for about a year, with the creator Adi Hasak, and she brought it to me to produce with her. We started developing it over the next two and a half years. We pitched it in the room to NBC, which was probably our first or second pitch. They said, Why aren’t you doing the lead in this? And I thought, Yeah, it’s a great role. I guess I had thought about playing Harlee because I helped develop the character in many ways, but I hadn’t committed to or attached myself as an actor to the project. Then they brought that up and said, We’ll do 13 episodes right now if you play the lead. It was a decision to be made in that moment, and I thought, There aren’t a lot of great roles for women in film right now, this would be a great thing for me to do, and I could produce it as well. There were so many pluses to it that I decided that it was something I wanted to do. WS: Shades of Blue airs on a broadcast network, but it has a cable series feel. LOPEZ: That was one of our goals. When we spoke to NBC, they were totally on board with that. Television is so exceptional right now—it’s like movies on TV—and broadcast needs to compete with cable in that sense, so we thought, How edgy can we be? How much can we push the envelope and make this feel like a cable show, and compete, quality-wise, with all that’s going on and bring the show to a broader audience on broadcast? We wanted to do that, and I think we’ve accomplished that. WS: What appealed to you about the character of Harlee Santos, and what’s been her journey so far? It was an incredible first season. LOPEZ: It was insane! I just loved the idea, from the beginning, of the family. Even though they were cops, it felt a bit like the Mafia—there was so much loyalty. Harlee herself was strong in her conviction, even though she was walking this tightrope of what’s right and wrong on a bigger moral level. But she was also trying to keep all sides going: walking on the FBI side, on the side of her loyalty to her family [of cops], and then there’s her loyalty to herself and her child. As an actress, that was such a compelling thing to play. She had that one thing that mattered more than anything, which was her daughter. It was so challenging, Harlee juggling this life, that it was just a real treat to play her. WS: Harlee seemed tormented a lot of the time. She was trying to keep all those balls in the air and not let on what was going on. LOPEZ: As the title says, shades of blue—it’s those gray areas: what’s right and what’s wrong, and doing the wrong things for the right reasons, and how good she was. The FBI targeted her because she was so good at keeping things under control— which is hard for me to play because I’m a very emotional person. She was great at playing both sides of the fence and lying and keeping her calm. You never knew if she was lying
and that was a challenge for me because I’m a terrible liar in real life! There were so many nuances in each scene I played, sometimes I just didn’t know what the hell was going on! But I went with my instincts of what I felt she would do. WS: Tell me a little bit about your relationship with Ray. You two have incredible chemistry on screen. LOPEZ: He and I were the most unlikely pair, as he would tell you, but something happened when we got in our first scene together, there was this instant chemistry. There was instant respect for one another and one another’s previous work. And in the room, his presence as a person and my presence as a person—there was just something that happened where we fell right into our roles so easily around each other. We were lucky to have that type of chemistry right from the beginning. WS: You are one of the executive producers of the show, so, aside from being one of the stars, how many more responsibilities do you have? LOPEZ: We have so many responsibilities as producers. Every single little aspect, from developing the script in the beginning to giving notes all through the process, but also [checking what’s happening] in front of the camera, behind the scenes, bringing that whole group together, then making sure that’s functioning properly every day. I’m the most on-set producer that there is probably besides David DeClerque, who’s there all the time. We’re watching everything that’s happening and making sure everything goes well. Is the scene working? Are we in the right setting? And helping the directors because we have one director every two episodes, so they’re coming into “our world.” They depend on me—not as the star of the show, but also as a producer—to say, Does this seem right? This is good, but this doesn’t feel as good. I think we should do it like this. Harlee would do this. Woz would be more like this. And then also managing all those personalities, making sure everybody’s getting along and feels good and is doing their best work. A producer’s responsibilities are varied; it’s not just the script, and it’s not just story, which is one of the most important things, but all of these pieces have to come together to make a great show. WS: What types of projects does your production company look for? LOPEZ: My producing partner, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, will bring me lots of different ideas, and some I respond to immediately and I feel are not just on-brand, but I respond to viscerally as a person, as an artist, and that’s how we choose. She comes up with a bunch of different ideas and a lot of different things come across our desks, and you just go with your gut. What do you respond to? What do you feel you have something to contribute to? And that’s what we go with. It could be so many different things.
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Lopez followed up her stint on American Idol with her first dramatic role on television, Shades of Blue, which NBC has renewed for a second season.
WS: You were one of the first artists who crossed over from the Latino market to the mainstream market. How do you continue to serve your fans in both markets? LOPEZ: I always, from the beginning, identified so much with my Puerto Rican roots, but I also felt very American, so it was a very natural thing for me to feel both. I don’t really differentiate, and I think [the audience does] not differentiate either. I am who I am, and I’m very strong in that, and that means I am Puerto Rican, and I am American because I was born in New York. I’m a New Yorker and grew up in the Bronx; that’s very much part of who I am as well. I just take that into all my projects, and I don’t try to be anything but myself. WS: Do you consider yourself a singer first and then an actress? Or do you see yourself as an artist? LOPEZ: I think I’d go with an artist and an entertainer. I sing, I dance, I act, I produce and I create, that’s what I do on many different levels. That [filters into] branding and all kinds of things: creating perfumes and clothing lines and different ways I [see] the world. At the end of the day, I’m an artist. I do see myself as an entertainer first—as an actress, a singer and a dancer—and from that, all other things are created. WS: You do a lot of charity work. Why is this important to you? LOPEZ: I’d always been involved with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles before I had children, but once I had children I just felt a larger responsibility to the world and to making things better and using my voice for more good things in the world. The Lopez Family Foundation was something my sister and I started. At that time, we were both pregnant and thought about the kind of world we wanted our kids to live in. And, I don’t know, I just like doing good things. I like feeling like I’m doing something good, and I want to make the world a better place, in my own way. When I make a song like “Love Make the World Go Round,” [recorded with Lin-Manuel Miranda, with proceeds going to people impacted by the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando] that’s about me wanting to put a positive message into the world about love in a time when there is a lot of fear and violence going on. It’s just a part of who I am;
it comes naturally. You find the time to do things that are important to you and that you feel in your heart that you want to do. Between being a single mom, and making a living, and doing what I have to do, I like to find time to do things that contribute to the world that I live in, and make it a better place, and make people feel happy. I feel like I do that with my entertaining, but there are also other ways, like working with the United Nations and the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the Make-A-Wish Foundation, utilizing my celebrity and my fame and my voice for something positive. WS: I know you care a lot about girls, and given that your celebrity makes you a role model, what message do you have for girls nowadays? LOPEZ: The most important thing is equality—making my daughter feel that she is equal to any other person in the world, any man, anybody, that her worth and her value are so strong and so big that she can accomplish anything she wants. My work with the United Nations is about that as well. There is no country in the world where women are equal, but striving toward and changing that consciousness is going to make our world a much better place. That’s a long-term goal because changing people’s thinking is very difficult, but we do it little by little every day by learning to love ourselves and learning our own worth and values. WS: Do you feel that television, American Idol and Shades of Blue, allows you to strengthen the relationship you have with your fans? LOPEZ: I do it because of the art of it. I loved being on American Idol and talking about music. I loved mentoring kids. I loved being part of that dream-making franchise. That was a gift to me. I felt so great to be a part of that. As far as Shades, I do it because I loved the project to begin with. But right now, I feel like we’re in the golden age of television; it’s better than it’s ever been: the quality, the reach of what we’re doing, it’s just amazing to be a part of that with Shades of Blue. It makes me feel like I’m in the right place at the right time, stretching my limits as an artist, but also reaching people on a bigger level than you could anywhere else.
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Kiefer
Sutherland Designated Survivor is among the buzziest new shows on the U.S. fall TV schedule this year. It’s not hard to see why the ABC drama, which was ordered straight to series from The Mark Gordon Company, has critics, viewers and international buyers so excited. First, it stars Kiefer Sutherland, known to legions worldwide as fearless counter-terrorism agent and all-around badass Jack Bauer on 24. And its story line, about a lower-level U.S. Cabinet member thrust into the Oval Office following a terrorist attack, comes at a time when, in real life, a political outsider is just one election away from potentially becoming the leader of the free world. Amid his busy production schedule, Sutherland took time to talk to World Screen about why he was compelled to join the show and why he can’t wait to launch it to the international market with By Mansha Daswani Entertainment One at MIPCOM. WS: How did you hear about Designated Survivor, and what made you want to be a part of it? SUTHERLAND: I’ve been great friends with Mark Gordon over the last 20 years. While I was doing a film with Michelle Pfeiffer in New York, I had been sent the script. I was quite busy with other things, so doing a television show was not the first thing on my mind. But because I’ve been friends with Mark for a long time, I felt I owed it to him to give it a read. So I did what I consider a cursory read, where I read through something quite quickly but have enough information to be able to politely explain why I can’t do it. And by the time I got to page 25, I realized how brilliant the script was and what a fantastic idea it was. I remember saying, Shit, I’ve got to go back to the beginning and start reading it properly! And I did, and by the time I was finished I realized I was potentially holding the next ten years of my life in my hands. I phoned [Mark] up and explained that to him, and I told him how brilliant I thought it was. I was moved by the characters, and I thought that the situation, an attack on the U.S. Capitol and how this man becomes the president, was so enticing. I realized if I didn’t do it, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. WS: Tell me about your character, Tom Kirkman. What motivates him? What kind of leader does he see himself as? SUTHERLAND: I think he’s motivated by a real sense of service. What’s really interesting is that he’s not a political animal. He was not an elected official—he was brought in by the past president to be the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He had a very noble idea of how to improve low-cost housing across America. In this extraordinary circumstance [of becoming president], he realizes that he’s going to put the people he loves the most—his wife and his family—in some jeopardy. And yet he has this incredible sense of responsibility to serve. He does take that on and, in the very beginning of the show, does so with great trepidation. He takes on the responsibility as a
part-time thing. He wants to stand in as president of the United States to stabilize the country, not only on a domestic level, but on an international level as well. And once that’s accomplished, I think in his mind, certainly at the beginning of the series, he has every intention of stepping down and moving aside. So he will be, in my estimation, the most reluctant president in American history. WS: The show is part family drama, part political drama, part thriller. What can you tell us about what viewers can expect? How does Tom becoming president impact his family? And how do the people around him come to terms with him stepping into this role? SUTHERLAND: It’s very difficult for his family. You’re talking about two children being taken away from their home and moved into the White House overnight. How do they adjust to that? How do they adjust to the Secret Service? How do they adjust to their lives dramatically changing? One of them is a teenager. The demands of the job certainly affect [his relationship with his wife]. With regard to the very small group of people left in power adjacent to him, there is incredible mistrust. He has not gone through two years of an election campaign. He has not gone through the vetting process. And in the context of our story, there is certainly an argument to be made that he was going to be fired the night before [the terrorist attack] happened. In Washington, being the “designated survivor” is really almost viewed as a punishment—you don’t get to go to the State of the Union! In this circumstance, that person becomes the president. So there is a lot to deal with. You asked why I was excited about doing this script. I’ve done a television show for eight years, and I know the trappings of trying to do something where you can potentially produce 200 episodes. The way that David Guggenheim [creator of the show] wrote this script laid out a canvas that was so vast. The real fear [in long-running drama] is painting yourself into
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Designated Survivor, a new ABC drama from The Mark Gordon Company, is being launched at MIPCOM by Entertainment One.
a corner with regard to your story. And David has laid this out in a way that I think has given us the opportunity to not do that. WS: You mentioned being friends with Mark Gordon for a long time. What has it been like working with him on Designated Survivor? SUTHERLAND: I think Mark is one of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with—and not only as a hands-on producer with regard to the economics of [production] and figuring out how to create the best situation for the show’s release. What he’s managed to do for the show internationally is very exciting as well. WS: The Mark Gordon Company and Entertainment One (eOne) are outside of the traditional Hollywood studio system as independents. Does that result in a different working environment on the set of the show? SUTHERLAND: I had an incredible experience on 24, which was about as mainstream a circumstance as you can imagine, working for a major studio and a major network at Twentieth Century Fox. I’m having the same experience with ABC. I’m thrilled with the amount of energy and financing they’ve put behind the release of the show. They’ve done an incredible job. What Mark did that was especially clever was [setting up] his studio with eOne, making it with a financing backer. That’s allowed him to have—not autonomy, because he has a great partnership with ABC—but real weight in his opinions. His opinion is one of the major reasons I wanted to work with him. He and I share the same one 98 percent of the time. What he’s done with that outside thing you’re referring to is he’s managed to make that work for him in a very commercial, mainstream way. WS: How do you think Designated Survivor, given its premise, is going to resonate with viewers amid the strange political climate in America right now? SUTHERLAND: David Guggenheim did not write the script thinking, I’m going to put it out there in the third year of an electoral
cycle. It was one of those things where it just seemed like the stars aligned. I don’t think it was as calculated as it might appear to be. Having said that, this is the most divisive electoral cycle that I have ever seen in my lifetime, and that’s been five presidencies. I have never seen anything like this, and I don’t think you’d hear any argument about that from anybody else around the world or in the United States. Look back at Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter—at that time, the difference in policies between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party [was so small], you could almost split them with a piece of paper. [The differences were in] how they envisioned accomplishing things. Now, the divide is personal. Everybody wants a great economy, everybody wants more jobs, but the divide is not simply on policy, it’s, “This person can’t do [the job] because they wore the wrong kind of dress.” The divide is almost ridiculous and the chasm way too wide. Our show is fundamentally about dealing with a major crisis. We’re taking that crisis and using it to try to narrow that divide and, in the context of our show, bring a country back to a place where that chasm is not as wide. On some level, while you’re watching the vitriol in this [presidential] campaign, I think our show is actually going to be quite hopeful. WS: And you’re coming to Cannes to launch Designated Survivor to the global market? SUTHERLAND: Yes, I’m very excited. I’ve only been to MIPCOM once before [to launch the show Touch]. I had such a great experience on 24, but because of the work schedule, I had never been able to go to something like MIPCOM. And I hadn’t been able to thank so many people who had been helpful to that show internationally. So I am really looking forward to that experience. I’m so excited about the potential of this show. To be able to go to MIPCOM and thank certain people who have really been instrumental in my career—there are a lot of people I haven’t had the opportunity to even meet yet—I’m really looking forward to it.
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Aidan
TURNER
The period drama Poldark tells the story of a heroic British soldier who returns to his native Cornwall after fighting in the American War of Independence to find his father has died, his land is ruined and his betrothed is about to marry his cousin. Based on novels by Winston Graham, Poldark was originally adapted for television in the ’70s. Recently Mammoth Screen, which is owned by ITV, made a new version starring Aidan Turner as Captain Ross Poldark. It has broken ratings records on BBC One and garnered critical acclaim. Turner talks about playing this flawed hero whose strong moral compass leads him to do anything By Anna Carugati for his townspeople and for the woman he loves. WS: Did it weigh on you to be reprising a character that was so beloved? TURNER: It didn’t really. You need to take responsibility for the role and know it’s quite a coveted one. You want to nail it and get it right. I’m aware that the first series was a big hit, but that’s kind of where it ends. After that you take the books and Debbie [Horsfield]’s scripts, and you work on it and then just go for it. Whatever research and work you’ve done prior to shooting is what’s going to be [on screen]. It’s quite unhelpful to be on set and feel the weight of it and think, Are we getting this right? What did Robin Ellis [who played Poldark in the original series] do and did he do it better? I haven’t seen the ’70s version of the show and I don’t plan to before I’m finished with Poldark. I wanted to make Ross mine and for me, garnering ownership over the role was about believing in myself and ridding myself of any self-doubt before the shoot.
WS: What do you like about Ross? TURNER: He’s real for me. He’s heavily flawed. That’s what I loved so much about the first [season], people saying, He’s this great upstanding moral character and he’s the people’s hero. He is all of those things, but he’s a man as well. He makes some fundamental mistakes. Emotionally he’s not adept at all. He can never really read Demelza [his wife]. He’s not great at figuring out what she feels. He has trouble figuring out what he’s done wrong. He’s a proud guy too, so [he doesn’t always say] What did I do? But he is thinking, Could I have caused this? He bypasses his emotional highway all the time. He’s way more comfortable on a battlefield screaming orders at soldiers or down in a mine figuring out which vein of copper they’re going to blow up with gunpowder than he is sitting down and telling Demelza how proud he is that they’ve had a baby girl or how much in love with her he is.
WS: What appealed to you about Ross Poldark? He’s a complex fellow, with a strong moral compass, but he’s also impulsive. TURNER: Yes, he’s temperamental. He’s not good at delegating any work to anyone else. He’s a very proud guy and he wants the weight of the world on his shoulders. I think that’s when he feels the most comfortable. He needs to be in control all the time. Not just because he solely trusts himself, but also if anything does go wrong he wants to bear the responsibility. I don’t think he likes other people to feel like they’ve been let down. He felt real to me from the very first read. There’s a lot going on with this guy, and every emotion he’s feeling I can recognize and seems to fit with what’s happening in the story. I don’t need to throw myself very much into that time of 1783 and imagine what’s going on culturally, historically, politically in the country. I can just tune into what this guy is saying, what people are saying to him, his relationships with other people, and through that figure out emotionally where he’s at. That seemed to happen all the way through reading the first couple of episodes. I related to him straightaway. He seemed like a modern man, but I don’t mean modern as in contemporary; there’s something about him that’s moving with the times.
WS: What can you tell us about season two? TURNER: [At the end of season one] Ross gets arrested for inciting a riot and for the murder of Matthew Sanson. George Warleggan wants Ross put in jail and hanged, and he’s the guy that can make it happen. So [at the start of season two], we see Ross getting arrested. He’s brought to the courts and awaits the charge. He’s released on bail so he can sort out his counsel and figure out what he’s going to do. We left Demelza and Ross in [season] one on the side of the mountain in Cornwall letting go of a ribbon with their baby’s name— they’ve just lost their child and now he’s being arrested. In those days you didn’t survive a jail sentence because the jail was so rampant with disease and the conditions were horrible. He doesn’t think he’s going to get there, but he’s just putting all of those thoughts to the side. It’s a tough start for them, for a couple that’s had so many highs in the series, when they were making some money and having children and in the midst of marital bliss. Now it’s rock bottom for them. You wonder, Are they going to survive it? What’s going to happen if Ross does go to jail? Will Demelza be able to take care of this house? Where will the money come from? She can’t support herself at all. It’s a scary time for them. The only way is up for them. We’ll see what happens!
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Matthew
PERRY Viewers around the world first got to know Matthew Perry as sardonic Chandler Bing on the megahit comedy Friends. He has since starred in TV series and feature films and has also pursued his passion for writing, working on the pilot of The Odd Couple, a sitcom for CBS. He ventured away from comedy by taking on the role of Edward “Ted” Kennedy in the Muse Entertainment miniseries The Kennedys: After Camelot. Perry talks to World Screen about playing the complex and conflicted man tasked with carrying on the Kennedy legacy in the aftermath of By Anna Carugati the assassinations of his two brothers. WS: The miniseries starts after Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. What was Ted’s mindset at the start of the series? PERRY: The thing about Teddy is that he always lived in his brothers’ shadows. He wasn’t as smart as the other two, and he had to deal with the fact that he knew that was the case. But people still wanted a Kennedy to run for [president at] the Democratic National Convention. He’s being asked to do this and knows deep down that he’s not ready to be president, so he turns it down. And then Chappaquiddick happened [the car accident in which Ted was driving and a young woman died]. So the miniseries takes you from Ted Kennedy at the age of 38 to the age of 67. What’s interesting is that he’s the one Kennedy you don’t know that much about. WS: How do we see him evolve? PERRY: You don’t see Teddy evolve that much because his evolution happened much later in life. Later than what this story tells. He does find a purpose for living in the course of this miniseries, and then follows that, and ended up being one of the greatest senators we’ve ever had for 40 years. But we’re showing mostly his screwups, and then he redeems himself in this speech where he talks about how he’s responsible for his failures, no one else. He essentially apologizes for his screw-ups. I think he was a great man; he just had some flaws. WS: What were the challenges of playing a person who existed in real life, compared to playing a fictional character? PERRY: Well, you get tempted to do just an imitation of the man. What I did was hire a vocal coach for about five weeks. I was doing a play in London, so during my downtime, I would Skype with a vocal coach and learn exactly the way that Teddy spoke, which is the thing that made me the most nervous. 90 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
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PERRY: Very important. I was driving in my car and thought to myself, It’s been about 45 years since The Odd Couple [was first] on television. It’s time to remake that. And it’s been a dream of mine to play the role of Oscar Madison since I saw Walter Matthau do it in the movie. I just loved that part. I thought, Why don’t I try to get The Odd Couple remade at CBS, where they just launch shows better than anywhere else, and I’ll play Oscar Madison? And magically it all came true!
Matthew Perry plays Ted Kennedy in Muse’s The Kennedys: After Camelot, set to air on REELZ in 2017.
I’ve played dramatic scenes before, but I’ve never imitated someone before. I learned a pretty decent Ted Kennedy imitation and worked on it really hard. And then we got to the first day of shooting and I started talking like Ted Kennedy. I found out later that freaked everybody out. They were wondering, Why is he talking that way? How can we get him to stop? And then it all came together. The writer talked to me, the director talked to me and they said what they wanted. They did not want a Ted Kennedy impression. They wanted me and what I could bring to the role, with Ted’s Boston upper-crust accent, which I did. But I had to switch gears on day one because I was imitating Ted Kennedy and they told me they did not want that. Usually, when actors get a movie, they kind of look through the script and go, OK, I won’t have to act on that day, that day’s easy, there’s a hard day. There wasn’t one easy day on this miniseries. It was always hard stuff to do because the Kennedy family was a real tragedy, like a Shakespearean tragedy. Just awful things happen to them over and over again. In this movie I cry a lot, I make a lot of speeches, there’s certainly nothing funny going on. It was delving into his panic during Chappaquiddick, his dealing with the fact that he got away with it, his womanizing, his drinking, the fact that he was so mean to his wife.
WS: What did you want to preserve from the first series or even the film, and how did you want to refresh it? PERRY: Well, the key element to The Odd Couple obviously is the chemistry between Oscar and Felix. That’s what you have to maintain. One is sloppy and one is a neat freak and they’re forced to be together and that ends up being very funny. So that’s the main thing that we tried to preserve. We went out looking for a Felix, and we had like 100 different guys to read Felix, and then Thomas Lennon, who is wonderful, came into the room and didn’t read, he just sort of acted like Felix. I still don’t know if he was being himself or the character, he just talked to us. And we were like, That’s Felix Unger! He got the job the very day that he walked in. We were very fortunate that Thomas and I do have that kind of chemistry; we are funny together and we are funny off of each other. And where the show is at its best, I think, is when the two of us are fighting. And then we make up and people like that, too. The main thing that CBS wanted—and I wanted, too—was to modernize the show; put it in 2016, so it’s not just a total remake of the first one. So we made a couple of changes. Oscar has a ticker tape across 12 flat-screen TVs in his living room, which was a lift from my own life. And we put him on a website radio show instead of just being a sports writer. The big difference between this Odd Couple and any of the other incarnations is, this one is much more of an ensemble show. We can go elsewhere and tell other stories that Felix and I may or may not be in. WS: Do you mind if we spend a word or two on Friends? PERRY: That show about six people living in New York? [Laughs] WS: You must be aware of the huge impact it had not only on the people who first watched it when it aired on NBC, but the new generation that’s watching it in reruns. PERRY: Yes, the new generation who comes up to me and asks me for my autograph and then asks why I look so old!
WS: Do you flex different acting muscles in drama compared to comedy? PERRY: Yeah, it’s different. Most of my work through the years has been in comedy. The way that I work a comedy scene is I look at it, see how I can maybe improve it, how I can say things differently than what’s expected of me to say to get a new kind of laugh. Or try to beat the laugh by coming up with a funnier line. On The Odd Couple, which I’m doing now, that’s what the job is. You rehearse the scene but you’re always thinking, Hey, maybe if I said this. You’re pitching jokes along the way all the time and being very creative. In drama, you just have to get very real. And it’s a different form of acting. You play it much more realistically than a sitcom. In a sitcom, if you are playing a guy who is sad, you can’t be sad for too long because you’re trying to make people laugh. In a movie, that guy can be sad, he can cry, he can talk about it, but in a sitcom, he’d only be able to joke about that fact that he was sad.
WS: What impact did working on the show have on you professionally and personally? PERRY: It had a huge impact on my life. It changed my life entirely. I went from just a journeyman actor for hire into [having] the biggest job a person can get. And there are upsides and downsides to that. You lose your anonymity, but you get to do creative work with great people every day, and it’s really fun. You get comfortable playing the role. Obviously, you’re getting paid really well. So there are ups and downs about it. I wanted to follow up on Friends actors being recognized with a real story that Matt LeBlanc told at dinner. He said somebody came up to him and said, “Hey, are you Joey’s dad?” It didn’t go over very well. [Laughs]
WS: You mentioned The Odd Couple. How did that come about? The original iterations were important to you?
WS: Is that worse than what you’re hearing? PERRY: I haven’t been asked if I’m Chandler’s dad! [Laughs]
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MILESTONES
By Kristin Brzoznowski
As it aims to serve Australians with premium video content on all platforms available, Nine Entertainment Co. has business lines that span free-to-air broadcasting, subscription video-ondemand, digital channels, online websites and more. Among its businesses, Nine Network encompasses the flagship Channel Nine, which is one of three commercial free-to-air networks operating in Australia, delivering audiences a mix of locally produced programming and exclusive international content. Key to Nine’s schedule are its signature news and current-affairs programs, and sports content from the National Rugby League and Cricket Australia, as well as franchises like The Voice and The Block. The main network is complemented by the digital multichannel networks 9Go!, 9GEM and 9Life, which hone in on different demographics. Through the catch-up service 9Now, viewers can access the wealth of programming from Nine’s networks live or on-demand across multiple devices. Nine Entertainment is also a joint-venture partner with Fairfax Media in the Australian SVOD service Stan. In its results for the 2016 financial year, Nine Entertainment reported revenues of A$1.28 billion ($968 million) and a profit of A$120 million ($90 million). The results highlighted a year of tightly managed costs and came with a commitment to increase premium local content in 2017 by 50 percent. As Nine Network is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, Hugh Marks, the CEO of Nine Entertainment Co., tells World Screen about the channel’s legacy and how it’s positioned to thrive in Australia’s changing media environment. 94 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
WS: In the very crowded Australian television landscape, how does Nine Network stand out and what does it represent for viewers? MARKS: The traditional free-to-air side of our business, Nine Network, stands out through the strengths of its key pillars, which are news and current affairs, which millions of people come to every day; our premium sports, and we have one of the major winter sports and the major summer sport; and the quality of our premium entertainment offering, which, through shows like The Voice and The Block, continues to deliver big audiences. That diversity of local content and the move away from the domination of foreign content into spending more on premium and local content gives the traditional freeto-air business a great relevance going forward. When you add to that our AVOD business in 9Now, which has grown from 0 to 1.3 million users in [a few] months, and our fifty-fifty joint venture with Fairfax, Stan, which is performing to plan and is clearly the number one local SVOD service, we’re maintaining the strength of our traditional business while diversifying into the areas where our audiences are consuming video. We look at ourselves as a video business. We’ll make that video available wherever consumers want it. WS: What role do homegrown dramas and comedies have on Nine? MARKS: Interestingly, for drama, the business model is changing faster than other genres. The great thing about drama is that it has a long shelf life. We can repeat it and we can make it available on our on-demand services and, particularly when we’re in a position to stack various seasons of shows, they continue to pull in audiences over many, many years. That’s a real strength of drama. The challenge for drama is that its strength is also a weakness. In the overnight ratings, the requirement is for people to watch the show overnight, but audiences are certainly changing their behavior with scripted content. I think we’re in the middle of a period where that business model is changing. We need to embrace that world and we need to sell it to advertisers. We’re an advertiser-supported business. The value of [drama] will be in the substantial audiences it will have in the future in an on-demand context and in our ability to monetize that. There has been a bit of a change, and that change is ongoing. As we all invest in on-demand platforms and consumers start to use them more, I think drama will start to make a bit of a comeback in this market.
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WS: How do the digital channels 9Go!, 9GEM and 9Life complement Channel Nine? MARKS: The digital channels give us the ability to target an audience demographic that is still reasonably broad but is more targeted than the all-purpose main channel. With 9Life in particular, we have the ability to focus on grocerybuyers and children, a key ad demographic, and serve programming that can bring in that very specific demographic in big numbers. 9GEM is targeting a 40-plus female audience. 9Go! is more of a youth network. All three channels have a specific audience target, and over time that target will be recognized as having premium value because of the specific nature of the audiences. WS: What roles do imported programs and formats play on Nine and the digital channels? MARKS: Quality international formats will always be very important. A proven success overseas makes your job so much easier [when trying to create a hit show] in Australia. Generally, those formats are reasonably expensive, and they will be on the main channel, not on the multichannels at this point. They play a very important role in our premium tent-pole entertainment programming.
In terms of other imported programs, there is obviously declining relevance on the main channel. The availability of those programs on so many different channels and services means that audiences can consume them [easily]. So our ability to get a premium outcome is minimized. However, when you’re targeting a specific demographic on your multis, it means that the sort of programming that you can buy now, as opposed to what you used to buy, broadens as well. There’s so much good content out there. Imported programming on the multichannels is very much a part of their future. WS: Tell us about the catch-up service 9Now. What prompted the decision to launch it and how has it been received by viewers? MARKS: We did have a catch-up product before called 9Jumpin. It just wasn’t a great product, so 9Now was really about us saying that our catch-up service wasn’t world-class, and we needed a world-class service. We launched 9Now at the beginning of February, and at the end of June we had 1.3 million regular users. The viewership is up probably somewhere between 25 percent for long-form programming and up to 40 percent for shortform content. For us, 9Now is more than just a catch-up service; it’s an overall video service. Combining that longform catch-up and short-form content is the business model. [We’ve seen the] number of regular users [increase] in such a short period of time, and that will continue to grow quite aggressively year on year. That is a real foundation for this business in the future. WS: How did Stan come about? MARKS: We could see from the way that audience consumption was changing that on-demand viewing is a very modern audience behavior. When consumers can get something when they want it, on the terms that they want it, at a pretty cost-effective price, that’s going to be appealing to them. It also ties into the change in the role imported programming plays in Australia. It used to be that the U.S. networks made a lot of big and broad scripted shows that translated well to the Australian market. Now, even in the States, SVOD is where a lot of the programming is going and the nature of the shows is different. They are a little more niche and much more “must watch” for a smaller audience. [At the same time, we saw that] on-demand was clearly going to be a business, and we were very determined to ensure that if that represented the growth of video in this market, we wanted to be a major player. It was very much our initiative. We talked to a range of parties about cooperating with us in this market, from the perspective of having a local player that is of a scale, size and substance to be able to compete with the international players. Through that process, Fairfax was the one that picked up the ball and ran with it as a partner. It’s been a successful joint venture and a great relationship. I think that business will grow quite substantially in value over the next few years.
Love Child, produced locally, is one of Nine’s top-rated dramas.
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WS: What are the forecasts for the advertising market in Australia this year? MARKS: While the total ad market grows, free-to-air television looks to be slightly negative for this financial year. We recently announced an initiative, Think TV, which follows Thinkbox in the U.K. We as an industry need to get out and effectively market the dominance of free-to-air television in terms of its ability to reach a mass audience and the value of that mass audience to advertisers, particularly along brand campaigns. I do think that free-to-air has a strong future, particularly if we can continue to offer great content. That whole shift out of foreign into local content and the ability that provides us to offer more mass-audience propositions to advertisers will be the foundation of the business in the future. WS: How have you been growing Nine Entertainment Co. through Nine Ventures? MARKS: Very successfully over the history of this company. Someone recently gave me a number that said that the ventures that we were part of at some stage are now worth something like A$9 billion ($6.8 billion)— that’s more than the market cap of our company! It has been a very successful thing in the past. Having just come out of the private-equity debt workout and ownership and listing, we will continue to explore ventures in the future. I’m interested in ventures that are not completely divorced from our business, ones we can look at and see how they can fit with our business going forward. Those are the sorts of things that we’ll be looking at from this point. WS: How much of a threat are platforms like Netflix to the free-to-air channels in Australia? MARKS: Obviously there are audiences taking up those services. We can see that with Stan. That’s also fragmenting viewership of content. We look at that and say, first, it’s an opportunity for us to play in that market—can we be an aggressive player in the on-demand market to more than make up for whatever impact [it’s having]
Sports is a core offering on Nine, with a lineup that includes live coverage as well as entertainment shows like AFL Footy Show.
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on the free-to-air market. Second, we’re certainly adjusting our television schedule to focus our investment on the areas where the audiences are consuming free-to-air viewing and taking investment out of those time slots and areas where the audiences are consuming more in an on-demand environment. It’s a little bit selffulfilling, but I think that looking at on-demand as a complementary business to free-to-air is the right way for us to consider it. Of course, on-demand won’t just impact free-to-air; it will also impact other forms of television viewing such as pay TV in this market. For us, on-demand is very much a complement to the strength of the traditional free-to-air model, and we’re focusing our investment in those places where that complementary experience works best. WS: What opportunities for growth do you see for Nine Entertainment Co. in the next 12 to 24 months? MARKS: I certainly see opportunities for growth in the expansion of revenues in the on-demand environment; that’s both advertising-supported through 9Now and subscription-supported through Stan. Also, in a free-toair context, our ability to change our cost base and adapt our programming schedule to reflect audience behavior means that we should be able to provide many [high-rated] shows to the market, and those—as audiences fragment across all media, not just ours—will increasingly have value. Our ability to continue to attract mass audiences around key program franchises, and the value that brings in a fragmented media context, combined with our ability to deliver a digitally informed audience—meaning data sales from the information that we have about audiences—will underpin the business going forward. Another category that we will grow aggressively is our content business and the exploitation of that content in whatever ways we can. Video content is where the market is, and our ability to generate that video content is unrivaled, so we need to focus on the opportunities that brings. I think there are a number of growth opportunities for us.
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IN THE NEWS
cable brands. It will allow people to watch live events, sports, news—all the great things that are in the current window of content today—along with all the on-demand options that come with those channels. And, of course, we will offer our broad-based subscription on-demand offering. The way we look at it is, no matter which of these products customers purchase from Hulu, the experience ought to be personalized and tailored to their tastes and needs. That will be the case whether someone is buying our subscription on-demand offering, or our live channels offering—or both, and that’s exciting. WS: Will you target customers who don’t have a cable subscription? HOPKINS: We’re definitely targeting young consumers who have either decided not to opt into a pay-TV subscription or have opted out—the “cord-nevers” of the world. We’re aiming to provide this “always connected” generation with a subscription service that has all the best content at an affordable price, and make sure that the experience is great and tailored to them.
By Anna Carugati
Hulu is an online subscription on-demand service that offers its 12 million subscribers in the U.S. a mix of current and full seasons of popular TV series, films and original series. Hulu benefits from good relationships with its shareholders, NBCUniversal, 21st Century Fox, The Walt Disney Company and Time Warner, which picked up a 10-percent stake this summer. As CEO Mike Hopkins explains, Hulu will soon be complementing its SVOD service with a bundle of broadcast and cable networks that will allow subscribers to watch shows, sports and news, either live or on-demand. WS: What are you learning from your subscribers about the kinds of programming they want and how they want to watch that content? HOPKINS: As you look out over time, this one-to-one internet delivery system will provide us, and others, the ability to tailor the offering for each individual. People want a more personalized experience with their television. Another important factor will be consumer choice—giving power to the consumer to customize and tailor their experience. This will be happening more broadly in the industry so that people can have their favorite content at their fingertips no matter where they are and no matter what time of day it is. That fundamental consumer control is really what TV and entertainment will look like in the future. WS: I’ve read that you will be offering live and recorded programs from a streamlined bundle of broadcast and cable channels. HOPKINS: We plan on launching a new over-the-top service that offers live programming from broadcast and 100 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
WS: How does the viewing break down between the two services you provide, the one with limited ads and the one with no ads, and are you seeing one service grow faster than the other? HOPKINS: When we were looking to make that new package available, what we call our No Commercials plan, we did some research. We found that consumers broke into two camps—they were either “ad acceptors” or “ad avoiders”—and the ad avoiders were clearly not interested in the [regular] Hulu subscription [with commercials] because there were so many other commercialfree options out there. So we built the No Commercials service for them and we definitely have attracted a good number of subscribers that just weren’t interested in Hulu before. What’s interesting is the research we did showed that the vast majority of our customers would continue with the limited commercials plan and that most new subscribers would choose the limited commercials plan. And that’s been the case. The lower-price plan of $8 a month with limited ads has proven to be a really valuable service for people. So the vast majority of them are choosing that plan. WS: Is Hulu experimenting with interactive ads, and working with advertisers to come up with different ways to provide advertising messages? HOPKINS: Yes, we’re very focused on the ad business and providing consumers and advertisers with new ways to connect. We’re putting a lot of energy into interactive rich-media experiences. What’s interesting is that almost from the beginning, Hulu offered these kinds of experiences when it was a free PC-based website. We have long offered advertisers what we call our ad selector, which allows a brand to provide multiple creatives
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film catalog quite a bit over the last year. And we continue to be aggressive in buying popular and critically acclaimed scripted series, like Homeland from Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution.
Hulu’s originals slate this year included 11.22.63, starring James Franco and executive produced by J.J. Abrams.
to consumers and let them choose which one of them they’d like to watch. We’ve done that sort of thing for a long time. What we’ve focused on recently is porting those kinds of experiences onto all of the devices, from mobile to the living room. We’re working with a lot of different partners and building a lot of things ourselves to give consumers more choice around their ads and give advertisers a richer way to interact with consumers. WS: You’ve been making considerable investments in original programming. HOPKINS: We’re excited about where we are with original productions. Of course, it takes time to build that brand and create shows and get them onto the platform. We’re at the end of what I would call our first season of originals. Last fall we launched three comedies: The Mindy Project, Casual and Difficult People. So far this year we’ve brought all three back. We also launched 11.22.63 and The Path, our first two dramas, and both of those have done well. So we’re almost a year in now to making what I consider to be our higher-profile, impactful original programming. This fall we’re launching Shut Eye and Chance, which stars Hugh Laurie, and we’re excited about both. Next year we’ll have The Handmaid’s Tale, starring Elisabeth Moss, as well as Harlots, which stars Samantha Morton and Jessica Brown Findlay. In addition, we’ve recently launched the Limelight Documentary series. Our first two will launch next year. Originals are critical for our business. Customers expect a service like ours to have compelling, highquality original programming, and we’re on track to achieve that. WS: Do acquisitions continue to be important? HOPKINS: We are heavily investing in acquired programming, across a variety of genres of TV shows and films. We’ve invested a lot in kids’ programming; we purchased a lot of content in that area over the last year and a half. Most recently we announced a deal with Disney for several of their bigger kids’ titles. We also announced an exclusive deal for Curious George a few months ago. On top of that, we carry a lot of Nickelodeon’s top shows, and have an output deal with Cartoon Network. We’re building a really strong offering and that’s an area of focus for us. We’ve also enhanced our 102 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
WS: Why was the Seinfeld deal important? You paid a good amount of money for a classic show. What message did that send to rights holders and your customers? HOPKINS: There aren’t very many truly iconic properties like Seinfeld, so when that became available we jumped at the chance to be its exclusive on-demand home. We saw it as a strong centerpiece for our comedy brand and for the huge audience that still is there for Seinfeld. The series has had remarkable staying power over the years. We felt it was a great deal for the price and we have it for a good long time. WS: What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing SVOD services in general? HOPKINS: What’s happened over the last two or three years is competition has increased. If you go back three or four years ago, there weren’t that many subscription on-demand services. There was us, Netflix, Amazon. Now, we’re in a very crowded environment, with the premium networks all going direct-to-consumer and with all of the niche SVOD services that have launched across almost every genre of programming. All of us are facing an incredible amount of competition. That means that you have to get better at what you do. You have to have better programming. When I sit here and say we have to have a great personalized service, we actually have to do that. You have to make the service invaluable in the lives of consumers. Over time, those of us who can deliver that are going to be successful and those who can’t will have a harder and harder time. WS: Is the personalized service one of the centerpieces of future growth? HOPKINS: The only way to exist moving forward is to be really good at making sure that customers have quick access to the content they may want to watch at that particular time. You can’t just throw it all out there and let people hunt and peck through a website or an application on TV. They’ll lose patience, and then they’ll be gone and they won’t be subscribers anymore. The stakes [are high] in this business. Those that can be incredibly good will have an advantage. That’s where we’re putting an awful lot of energy and focus. Because you want to make sure that people are having a great experience with the service and finding the great content that we have. There’s never a more disappointing moment than when a customer decides not to continue as a subscriber because they don’t think you have the piece of content that you actually have. If that happens, we’ve failed. So that’s why we’re so focused on it.
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CONTENT TR E N D S E T T E R
AWARDS or the sixth consecutive year, World Screen is teaming up with Reed MIDEM at MIPCOM to present the Content Trendsetter Awards to four programming executives to honor their contributions to the television industry. This year’s winners, Bonnier Broadcasting’s Cathrine Wiernik, Mediaset’s Zelda Stewart, UKTV’s Alexandra Finlay and Stan’s Mike Sneesby, reflect today’s varied and ever-evolving media landscape. Bonnier Broadcasting, part of Bonnier, one of the Nordic region’s leading media companies, includes the general-entertainment channel TV4, a suite of basiccable channels, a catch-up service and the SVOD platform C More. Mediaset is the leading privately owned media company in Italy. It comprises free-TV networks, including the flagship Canale 5, a group of payTV channels, and several nonlinear offerings. UKTV is the U.K.’s biggest multichannel broadcaster with ten linear networks and a VOD service. Stan is an SVOD platform serving the increasingly crowded and competitive Australian TV market. As viewers have more and more entertainment options and an increasing number of devices from which to enjoy films and TV programs, the challenge to all broadcasters, channel groups and streaming services today is to extend their offerings in order to reach viewers wherever they may be and on whatever screen they prefer. As a consequence, network schedules and on-demand menus must be rich in variety. It is the main
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responsibility of the four Content Trendsetter Award winners to source must-watch programming that will draw viewers and brand their networks or services. They will be presented their awards at the end of the Acquisition Superpanel: Global Strategies, which will take place on Wednesday, October 19, in the Grand Auditorium in the Palais des Festivals from 12:30 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. The discussion, moderated by World Screen’s group editorial director, Anna Carugati, will range from spotting shows that work with local audiences to negotiating the complex maze of rights required to provide shows on multiple platforms. “We are thrilled to be working with our friends at Reed MIDEM for the sixth consecutive year to honor these leading programmers with the World Screen Content Trendsetter Awards,” says Ricardo Guise, the president and publisher of World Screen. “With the experience they have built up working for services in many of the most competitive and dynamic markets in the world, these executives have developed keen eyes for spotting top-notch, on-brand imports to satisfy their demanding audiences. At the Acquisition Superpanel at MIPCOM, we’ll hear them share insights into their approaches to finding the best the global market has to offer. The must-attend session will surely provide plenty of useful information for anyone in the business of producing, buying or selling content in the new golden age of television. We are delighted to be honoring their achievements at MIPCOM.”
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C O N T E N T T R E N D S E T T E R AWA R D S CATHRINE WIERNIK Bonnier Broadcasting, Sweden As director of programs for Bonnier Broadcasting, Cathrine Wiernik oversees acquisitions, local productions and drama for all channels and platforms within Bonnier Broadcasting. This includes the free-TV station TV4 in Sweden, a group of basic-cable channels and the pan-Scandinavian SVOD platform C More. Acquisitions play an important role on all of TV4 Group’s channels and platforms. They are the backbone of niche channels like Sjuan, TV12, TV4 Guld, TV4 Komedi, TV4 Fakta and TV4 Film, and are an essential part of C More’s offering. But even on flagship TV4, imported programs, particularly serialized drama, if exclusive in nature and strategically scheduled, can draw high ratings. Two such examples are Broadchurch and The Night Manager. Recent acquisitions include The Young Pope, Victoria and Cold Feet. In the areas of co-financing or co-producing, Wiernik is keen on getting into projects early and forming alliances with the right partners in order to secure exclusive rights.
ZELDA STEWART Mediaset, Italy Having to fill the schedules of a broad spectrum of free-TV, pay-TV and online offerings, Zelda Stewart is acquiring product year-round. As the head of acquisitions at Italy’s leading commercial broadcast group, Mediaset, she buys for the three terrestrial networks, Canale 5, Italia 1 and Rete4, as well as for eight thematic free-TV channels. She also looks for product for a bouquet of 11 pay-TV channels, the standalone SVOD platform Infinity, the nonlinear catch-up service Premium Play and the online service Premium Online. Stewart acquires more than 1,000 episodes of TV series just for the group’s free-TV channels. Recent acquisitions from the U.S. include Game of Silence, Shades of Blue, Supergirl, Blindspot and Lethal Weapon, while Arrow, Gotham, Grey’s Anatomy and Mr. Robot are among the American series that have worked well on Mediaset offerings. Stewart also sources a good deal of European product, including TV movies and series from France, Germany and Spain.
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C O N T E N T T R E N D S E T T E R AWA R D S ALEXANDRA FINLAY UKTV, U.K. UKTV, the biggest multichannel broadcaster in the U.K., jointly owned by BBC Worldwide and Scripps Networks Interactive, consists of ten linear channels and its video-ondemand service, UKTV Play. The network’s 78,000 hours of scheduled airtime is filled with a mixture of original productions and acquired programming: first-run and exclusive content secured from global third-party suppliers ranging from the Hollywood studios to independent producers, as well as archive from BBC Worldwide, with whom UKTV has an output agreement. Alexandra Finlay, the company’s head of acquisitions and co-productions, acquires content from third parties for UKTV’s entertainment channels Dave, W, Gold and Alibi, as well as for UKTV’s affiliated nonlinear services. Finlay, who is also responsible for co-productions across all ten channels, has secured some of UKTV’s biggest hits, including Castle, Grimm, Murdoch Mysteries, Storage Hunters, Rizzoli & Isles, Suits and Quantico.
MIKE SNEESBY Stan, Australia A few years ago, in response to consumers’ changing viewing habits, the Australian media company Nine Entertainment Co. started looking for a partner to launch an SVOD service. It formed a joint venture with Fairfax Media and launched Stan with Mike Sneesby as CEO. In the small but extremely competitive Australian market there are already two SVOD providers, Netflix and Presto, but under Sneesby’s leadership, Stan has lined up an attractive offering for TV and movie fans. It ranges from cop thrillers, romantic dramas and comedies to cooking series, documentaries and naturalhistory shows. A number of much buzzed-about series from around the world premiere exclusively on Stan, including UnREAL, Power, The Last Ship, Transparent, Ash vs Evil Dead, Angie Tribeca and 11.22.63. Stan also has an exclusive output deal with Showtime for such series as Billions, Dice, The Circus and Masters of Sex, along with the upcoming Twin Peaks.
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RUNNING
Photo by Stuart Pettican
A+E Networks’ UnREAL.
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THE SHOW Elizabeth Guider talks to showrunners, network executives and studio chiefs about managing scripted series in the era of peak TV.
S Showrunners are in the catbird seat—and that seat is especially hot right now. Hot in that these folks are in demand and hot in that their high perch is being shaken as never before. If “disruptive” is the operative word used to describe the current TV landscape, the role, even the very notion, of showrunner has also come in for a rethink. More people are vying for or being drafted to do the job, with sometimes mixed results. In some cases, the competencies needed to run a show smoothly and effectively are being split between two or more people. Sometimes, especially at players like Netflix and Amazon, directors are being given a greater role in creative decision-making. Or, as with Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, the series is now being run “like a republic...with senior powers in every aspect of the realization of the show,” as David Zucker, its executive producer, told TV critics this summer.
In any case, the rethinking of roles and responsibilities in managing scripted series is a far cry from how things were done in the relatively staid broadcast-TV world of yore. “Back then, everything was very much the same—like the car industry: same wheels, same chassis, just a different color dashboard, as it were,” recalls Jeff Melvoin, a producer whose 30-plus years of credits include Remington Steele, Picket Fences, Army Wives and, currently, a project for Amazon set in pre-revolutionary Cuba called Tropicana. “The television system was industrial too—and by and large, it worked. Moreover, if you were a writer-producer back then and you came in to pitch, you had to sound like everybody else before you had [the right] to sound like nobody else.” But with the explosion of new outlets clamoring after new voices, and the insatiable appetite for dramatic fiction from audiences, the need for a lead voice who sparks collaboration but then hones a single vision—and keeps it intact during intrusions from the outside, including from the studio hierarchy—has, in the view of many senior executives, never been greater.
MULTITASKING MASTERS “Showrunners? They’re indubitably the CEOs of a series,” says Kevin Beggs, chairman of Lionsgate Television Group. “They’re the ones in charge—of writing, casting, establishing tone, marketing and messaging. So yes, their role is essential for effective production.” In addition to their writing and producing chops, these guys or
gals should, Beggs suggests, possess two other necessary qualities: excellent organizational skills and empathy. The only rub: such résumés are arguably in short supply.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? Given the mystique surrounding the process and the elevation of some series to cult status, the very designation “showrunner” has started to smack a little of the “selfcongratulatory,” suggests Frank Spotnitz, who as a writer-producer likes to consider himself simply “the primary creative voice” on the productions he runs. (It was Spotnitz who adapted the aforementioned Philip K. Dick dystopian novel and “ran” Man in the High Castle, leaving mid-second season. Per Amazon, his exit was because of conflicts with the planned shooting schedule; per Spotnitz, because of creative differences over the direction of the script. He has moved on to Ransom, a 13-parter for TF1 and Global— with RTL and CBS also on board— about an international crisis negotiator, and to The Indian Detective, a dramedy for CTV in Canada toplining Russell Peters.) “The great thing about the American system is its being collaborative without being chaotic: a lead writer-producer refines the vision,” Spotnitz says, adding that the preeminence of the showrunner started as a practical matter. It was the writer-producer who was historically the one who could fix the script on a tight deadline. That’s how the broadcast-network system for episodic drama evolved in the States.
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Nowadays, though, with shorter runs on cable and no hard airdates on online streamers, the showrunner role is splintering, sometimes leading to more input from directors or to roles split among different producers. With a staggering 450-odd scripted series airing every year now in the U.S. (and a growing number abroad as well), finding experienced players to oversee the entire creative effort is, in Beggs’s words, “quite difficult.” (For one thing, many of the more seasoned showrunners are tied up in long-term deals with the major Hollywood studios, which all have a corporate mandate, spoken or not, to supply their own sister networks with a constant flow of series.) That’s why Melvoin and others at the Writers Guild of America took it upon themselves a decade ago to set up a training program to prepare a new generation of showrunners. “We felt that we were losing the collective wisdom of those producers who had honed the craft of showrunning and established the template for long-running series,” he explains. (A number of those graduates have gone on to success, including Matt Nix of Burn Notice and Kenya Barris, who oversees Black-ish.)
TALENT SCOUTS That’s also why some cable outlets, taking a page from the majors’ playbook, have methodically nailed down overall deals or firstlook arrangements with those talents with whom they want to be in ongoing business. Take FX Productions, which has contracted with
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broadcast nets, cablers and online streamers that can travel successfully around the world. And, as at so many other independent companies, often the core idea originates from outside the U.S. and the project is funded by players on at least two continents.
THE TOTAL PACKAGE
Howard Gordon is one of television’s über exec producers, with a slate of projects across multiple networks, including FOX’s 24: Legacy. Noah Hawley (Fargo), Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans) and Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story), among others. “In our experience, it’s really about carrying on a robust dialogue with writer-producers we’re in business with, not riding herd on every creative choice they make,” says Eric Schrier, the president of original programming at FX Networks and FX Productions. “What we’re looking for among pitches or from producers sent our way is almost always a fresh or arresting point of view.” The goal at pitch sessions, Schrier says, is “to excavate everything interesting from the writer’s concept, turn that into a blueprint for the project, and then send him or her on their way to build it out.” Like several other executives around town, Schrier indicates that there’s no longer much discussion about what used to be called “pushing the creative envelope” with regard to sex, violence or strong language. Certainly not at the cable outlets, but less so too at the broadcast networks. Not that there aren’t limits to decency, but instances of gross overstepping of those bounds are relatively rare— and arguably the broader culture has become much more used to provocative scenes. Schrier points to one of his company’s latest projects, a series
called Snowfall, set in the cocainecrazed 1980s in Los Angeles, which had languished elsewhere. “When brought to us, we felt it created a world we hadn’t seen before on TV and did so from an angle that intrigued us. Plus, we’re comfortable with the people in charge of the project, that they can execute.” Of course, that doesn’t mean the demands on these multihyphenate showrunning talents are any less onerous than they were in the old days. With pro-
gramming budgets moving ever upward, and a plethora of writers not always with the necessary experience, background or personality traits, showrunners have often had to take on more responsibilities than preceding generations. “It’s true: A-list writers have never been more in demand, their various talents more called upon,” says John Morayniss, the CEO of Entertainment One (eOne) Television. Morayniss is in charge of putting together small-screen projects for
“As a general rule, I’d say that TV projects are being packaged more like independent movies used to be,” Morayniss says. “You have to corral a great script, then find a director, line up bankable acting talent and vie for one or another top showrunner. All that before one necessarily pitches it to a network.” He and others suggest that budgets for the high-end “event” series continue to go up, though no one we interviewed wanted to be drawn out on just how much of the pie is now being sliced off for these toptier showrunner talents. (Off the record, one analyst stated that the top 20 or so writer-producers in the U.S. are pulling in 20 to 25 percent more than they were three or four years ago, through upfront fees, a share of the back-end revenue or an actual tranche of the IP.) “To my mind, the biggest change in this part of the business
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Known for his big-budget feature-film productions, Baz Luhrmann went to Netflix for his first series, The Get Down, which is set in the 1970s and cost a reported $120 million. of late is that generalists—those folks who can write, produce, ride herd daily on a show—are back in vogue,” Morayniss says.
HEAVY HITTERS Morayniss points out that there are some non-writing producers who are also in constant demand— folks like Jerry Bruckheimer, Barry Josephson and Mark Gordon. In the case of Gordon, eOne took a sizeable stake in his company in January 2015. “What does Mark bring to the table?” Morayniss says. “He finds material, attracts writers and nurtures them, wields the scissors in the edit room, and knows the ins and out of marketing and promotion.” The non-writing producers often boast movie bona fides as well as long experience in the TV business. Gordon’s credits include the Oscar-winning Saving Private Ryan as well as CBS’s longrunning Criminal Minds and ABC’s Designated Survivor, a buzzy fall-season newcomer starring Kiefer Sutherland. “In short, what we’ve done is combine the indie studio infrastructure of distribution and sales capacity with the talents and potential output of a creative producer,” Morayniss continues. “Our idea is to empower such companies—and we have an in-house M&A group exploring other such partnerships—to take more risks
and allow them to own more of the assets they create.” As for what most excites showrunners themselves these days, it’s the variety and range of outlets that are now vying for fiction material, according to the producer Tom Fontana, who made his name on crime serials like Oz and Homicide: Life on the Street and who has now branched out in several different directions. “Every series I’ve done, be it for the networks, pay cable, foreign broadcasters or whomever, challenges me in a different way,” Fontana points out. Fontana recently joined Starz’s Havana Quartet as executive producer. He and his producing partner, Barry Levinson, are also working on a second season of the true-crime documentary series Killing Fields at Discovery. As for what irks showrunners the most, Fontana notes, “Often when we go in to pitch nowadays we hear the same refrain: ‘We don’t know what we want, but we’ll know it when we see it!’” What’s exasperating, and happens often at outlets that are rushing to leap onto the originalfiction bandwagon, is what comes next from the execs during the pitch session, according to Fontana: “OK, you have this great character, but can’t you make him (or her) a little more flawed—you know, like Bryan Cranston?” (The actor memorably played the highly
flawed protagonist Walter White in AMC’s Breaking Bad.) “The worst thing that’s happened to TV is branding,” says Fontana, in that it prevents some outlets from “coming up with something that hasn’t been seen before,” instead pressuring them to wring variations on past successes until they no longer have any life in them. “The truly original thing to do,” he suggests, “would be to go for a character who isn’t flawed, or at least isn’t flawed in the same way or to the same degree as a Walter White.” Spotnitz, who has spent the last six years working largely on the European side of the Atlantic, points to another challenge that studio and network gatekeepers need to address when making their greenlighting decisions. While there’s no doubt that the creative envelope has been pushed, and network executives now insist on writers and showrunners being daring, diversity on the small screen remains a huge problem, abroad as well as in the States, both in subject matter and in point of view. “It’s the white-male, liberal point of view that still predominates,” Spotnitz claims. Minorities are stereotyped, if they appear at all—and women are imagined largely from the male perspective. “It’s disgraceful,” he says. Not that Spotnitz and Fontana, like many other A-list showrunners, aren’t acutely aware of, and
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respectful of, the different needs and approaches of different outlets and that the business of television, starting with broadcast-network TV, is a brutal, relentless one. “Television is an imitative art— more so and at a quicker pace than cinema, for example,” says Lionsgate’s Beggs. “It grinds on, and industrial business logic would encourage the repetition of what already has worked.” That’s why, Beggs says, the process at the broadcasters is still very much about creating “a big, loud, cinematic pilot,” and then using that template to stamp the succeeding episodes. And it’s not as easy as it sounds. There are just not that many folks who can pull off that feat day in, day out, year after year.
EPISODIC ANGST Spotnitz, whose past credits include the megahit The X-Files, adds, “As a writer-producer, I have huge respect for episodic drama, which requires enormous discipline and trust within the writers’ room. Now it appears everyone wants to run off and do serialized drama. Admittedly, in doing these we get to go deeper into the characters’ lives, but occasionally weaknesses in narrative slip in because of such long lag times between seasons.” The broadcast networks are not going quietly into the night just because these serialized shows on cable are monopolizing so much of critics’ ink.
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After working on The Good Wife, the writer Courtney Kemp Agboh landed her first TV show, Power, at Starz, and has signed an overall deal with the premium channel operator. Jennifer Salke, the president of NBC Entertainment, says, “I think that given the new normal, creators feel that networks are no longer feeling beholden to overnight numbers, and with that comes a certain freedom, along with the ability to redefine what makes a show successful.” Salke goes on to describe the blurring of the lines between procedurals and serialized shows on her network, and how that is affecting her team’s choices of material. “The challenge is in finding a balanced schedule that holds both procedural shows as well as buzzy serialized drama and comedy. We look to program shows like Blindspot and The Blacklist that offer close-ended, compelling stories but also long arcs and serialized character stories that keep fans hooked. We hope Timeless (from exec producers Eric Kripke and Shawn Ryan) accomplishes the same balance.” On the other hand, she continues, “This Is Us will deliver a compelling close-ended story but will feel more serialized as [it follows] a group of characters who are interconnected. Even Dick Wolf’s Chicago shows strike a balance—telling a compelling episodic story but drawing audiences into the characters and interconnected story lines. We believe that audiences love and invest in characters whether the
series veers toward procedural storytelling or not. A straight procedural without compelling characters who get people talking won’t survive on our schedule.” Make no mistake: the enduring appeal of the best procedurals is broad enough that there is still a substantial back end for the best ones in both domestic U.S. syndication and from foreign license fees. On the other hand, it is serialized stories that have caught the imagination of young audiences of late, in the U.S. and elsewhere. It’s not that one genre has replaced the other, it’s that they cater, to some extent, to different audiences and rely on different viewer habits. Serialized dramas tend to invite bingeing or online streaming, and indeed that’s largely how they’re making their back-end money, rather than through traditional syndication.
PREMIUM BLUEPRINT If the highest form of flattery is imitation, then HBO, Showtime and Starz should be feeling pretty good about themselves. It can be argued that their consistent success in creating these darker, provocative, character-driven stories subsequently spurred a host of basiccable networks and, more recently, internet streaming services to jump into the game. “Not that much has changed” at Showtime Networks, says Gary
Levine, the premium-channel operator’s president of programming. “We’ve been looking for and extracting the challenging and thought-provoking out of writers and producers for decades, daring them on occasion to dig deeper. It’s just that more and more outlets are now trying to emulate what we do.” Competition for top-tier showrunner talent in Hollywood is fiercer, and it has become “a little more expensive” to tie up certain key names, Levine says. He also argues that some tasks on a show can be split up. Regarding Billions, for example, the writer-producers in charge, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin, were not “terribly experienced in TV” but otherwise “really talented and quick on the learning curve.” In Showtime’s relations with producers, Levine explains, it’s more about “ongoing conversations” than it is about flooding them with notes. One such director is David Lynch, who is reviving (and modernizing) his groundbreaking 1990 mystery series, Twin Peaks, for Showtime and who is predictably keeping details about the show, and footage, off-limits to outsiders. Carmi Zlotnik, the managing director of Starz, points to another aspect of the competitive landscape. “I think there’s no doubt the talent pool at the deep end has thinned out, so one of the things we’ve started doing is mining the
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talents who’ve been toiling in the indie-film biz.” Zlotnik explains that doing so has enriched Starz’s aesthetics and also helped keep pricing under control, as fees in the indie trenches have never been disproportionately high. “What’s low budget for us can be substantial in some cases for them,” he says.
FOSTERING TALENT Like Levine, Zlotnik emphasizes that in working with “really smart people,” Starz doesn’t have to micromanage them. What he and his team do is sniff out when a writer shows unusual promise for developing and exercising additional skills. “The first year we partnered Courtney Kemp Agboh with a seasoned producer [on Power], but when we assessed her grasp of the process and her conceptual ideas, we took the training wheels off,” Zlotnik says. (Agboh had spent time on the CBS hit The Good Wife.) He describes a similar trajectory for Emma Frost, who is a British writer now turned showrunner on the historical drama The White Princess. “The key for us with each of our drama projects is adaptation to the different skill sets and needs of the key creative,” Zlotnik stresses. Take the showrunner Ronald D. Moore (Outlander), for example: “Not much we can tell him. He knows the process, masterminds the
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FX’s critically acclaimed The Americans is set to come to an end in 2018, but the network is remaining in business with the show’s creators, Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, via an overall deal. logistics and knows how to go to market.” In other cases, it’s about pairing contrasting talents and always being alert to who can take on added roles. “In the end, it’s all about creating a good team that can work effectively together.”
CROSSING CONTINENTS While there’s little doubt that compelling dramas are being produced across the European continent, and a noticeable number of those efforts translated for the U.S., the actual process of production overseas has not shifted dramatically. Especially in regards to the showrunner figure. “We still tend to work with a single writer on a particular project, and it’s my job to encourage, protect and nurture that talent,” says Piv Bernth, the head of drama at the Danish pubcaster DR. “We typically divide the job of writer from producer, and we don’t utilize so-called writers’ rooms.” For one thing, it’s a budgetary issue (in that more writers cost more money, and European pubcasters’ allotments for each show tend to have a fixed ceiling), and for another, series’ runs are typically shorter than in the States. Bernth also insists that, despite the world of television becoming more global,
she believes that “the more local a story” the more likely it will travel. Specificity matters. “I tell them, develop and write what you know, without trying to guess what is fashionable.” The international success of Scandinavian series like The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen, all of which Bernth was involved in, would seem to validate her point. Another producer who has experience in Europe and America, Stephen Cornwell, is actively choosing from best practices on both sides of the pond. The six-part The Night Manager, top-lining Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, is a prime example of how different approaches can be combined to good advantage (and rave reviews). Cornwell, his brother Simon and the London-based executive producer Stephen Garrett largely split duties on the series, with a notable assist from the Cornwells’ dad, David, aka John le Carré. They also utilized the talents of a script manager and a lead writer, David Farr. “Each national system has its advantages and its drawbacks,” Cornwell believes. In the British system, where “a single writer typically goes off to pen a complete series on his own before anything airs,” the result is a “very distinctive authorship. At its best, you end up with an
intimate voice, a consistency of quality and a strong narrative arc. On the other hand, such an approach can mean that a show starts better than it ends. In some cases I’d say British shows do that, tailing off rather than building on their momentum.” From the U.S. system, which is where the Cornwell brothers have based their company, The Ink Factory, they have embraced “the more interactive process whereby every idea is challenged, every character dissected and every plot point debated.” And, at its best, Cornwell says, “that critical effort is sustained throughout the series.” Not that it always works or that one single person can juggle all those balls. “I think it takes an exceptional talent to be both a writer and a runner,” Cornwell asserts. “In such a fragmented business, with so many creative breakthroughs going on in television, I do believe there’ll be a rebalancing and, eventually, the emergence of a new type of showrunner.”
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT Given the admiration for the way TV is made in the States and a growing number of internationally set and financed projects getting commissioned, training for a more collaborative, multi-
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writer approach to drama production is starting to take shape in Europe. Backed by the EU, a training program called Serial Eyes, conducted in English in Berlin, works with 20odd writers each year from all over Europe to give them practical experience in working together and learning to run a writers’ room. Admittedly, few European broadcasters have put their feet in the water in establishing writers’ rooms for prime-time drama. But there is “a fascination with how things are done in Hollywood,” according to Benjamin Harris, the head of programs at Serial Eyes. “Showrunning sounds cool to a lot of European networks—after all, they are airing a lot of U.S. series that work well for them— but structural and cultural differences have limited a full-on embrace of the American methods,” Harris observes. Still, he points out, things are slowly changing. A few of the course’s alumni have been busily at work on pan-European projects, including Jana Burbach, who worked in a writers’ room on the Teutonic thriller Bad Banks for ZDF and ARTE, and Wiktor Piatkowski, who wrote the pilot episode of HBO Europe’s Wataha (The Pack).
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SHONDA RHIMES By Anna Carugati we’ve read your script and like it and you come to meet us and you sit in the interview and are just trying to please me, as opposed to stating your own real opinions, you are never going to make it past that process because I don’t want somebody who is just going to agree with me. If I have a bunch of people in the room who are agreeing with me, I might as well be talking to myself. WS: Grey’s Anatomy is in its 13th season. In a previous interview, you told me that at the beginning of each season you knew how you wanted it to end and you worked toward that. Is that still your strategy? RHIMES: That’s always the strategy. I don’t think there is any other way to do it. That show has to be planned that way. I am always working toward our end game and the story we are trying to tell. It makes [the show] better.
With five series on ABC’s 2016–17 slate, Shonda Rhimes is among the most successful creators and showrunners in Hollywood. The shows she has created, including Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, have delved into the ambitions, challenges and private lives of doctors; examined the political process; and provided loyal live-tweeting viewers with jawdropping moments. Her production company, Shondaland, is also responsible for the hit legal thriller How to Get Away with Murder and the dramatic caper The Catch. While overseeing budgets, casting, scripts and myriad details involved with producing prime-time shows, Rhimes sees herself principally as a storyteller. WS: Do you have a process for assembling your writers’ rooms? How do you vet writers? RHIMES: [When selecting writers], you want people in the room who you want to spend eight hours a day with, in very close quarters, sharing all the personal details of your life, because that is really what a writers’ room ends up being. Most [showrunners] ask people to write samples of other shows. I don’t like that. I always want to read an original piece of writing, an original script. I want to read a play. Once I hired somebody based on a story they wrote. I just want to know that the person can write and really write; that, to me, is very important. I never hire someone because they worked on this show or wrote a spec script of a Lost episode. I want somebody who has written something original that shows that they have a voice and an opinion. I also try to hire people who have a point of view about something. If
WS: What is the process for keeping Grey’s fresh every year? RHIMES: I treat every season like it’s the very last season of the show, and I’ve been doing that since season one. Treating it like the very last season of the show leaves every little bit of the show on the screen, so that at the end of the
WS: Scandal weaves important and topical issues into every episode. How do you balance those jaw-dropping moments with these serious issues? RHIMES: I don’t ever think of that as something we’re doing purposely. We are telling the stories that we feel are interesting. When we tell them, I am literally writing them because that’s what’s in my head at the moment; it’s not necessarily because we want to tell something topical. What’s terrifying most of the time is that we’ve written an episode two months earlier and shot it already, and I’ll come into the writers’ room and say, OK guys, that episode when we wrote about so and so, well, it just happened [in real life]. And now the episode is going to air and it’s going to look like we wrote it after [the fact]! That happens a lot to us. That was great until we got to this election cycle. We were either writing at the same time or a little behind the Donald Trump thing with our Hollis Doyle character. WS: How do you and the actors collaborate to bring characters to life? How has Kerry Washington contributed to Olivia Pope, and Viola Davis to Annalise Keating? RHIMES: Those are very different relationships. Pete Nowalk, who writes and created How to
SHONDA Rhimes owns a signiFIcant portion of the abc schedule, with hit shondaland shows that include scandal AND how to get away with murder. season I truly have no idea what we are going to do next season. I remember ending the season with the plane crash and saying, All right, the writers’ room is going to assemble next season, and if anybody has any idea how to get out of that forest, [speak up]! It’s really important to me that we write everything and don’t do the thing that many people do, which is hold stuff back and keep things going slower. You want to write everything like this is it, so every season is as exciting as it can be. What keeps it fresh, what keeps me interested and the reason I can still pay attention to the show and care about it is that every season is a different show. Meredith Grey is moving through her own little 24-hour movie, as far as I’m concerned, versus the same show year after year after year. I couldn’t do that. 122 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
Get Away with Murder, has a different process and relationship with Viola than I have with Kerry. I am very much [the one to say], Here is the script, here are the words, they are not changing. But I am also never going to tell you how to interpret them or what to do. For me it’s, Here is the text, and I’m excited to see what comes back to me on screen with your performance. And that performance often dictates what happens next in the show. I’ll watch something in the editing room and then run back up to the writers’ room and say, Oh my God, these two characters are secretly in love with each other, and I can tell that from how they played this scene. Or, Oh my God, I think this person might be the person who stole the election; I can tell because of how they played this scene. It’s not about Kerry saying, I think
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Disney-ABC’s Untitled Shondaland Project. the character should do this, or me telling Kerry, I think your character should act this way. The collaboration comes through [me saying], Here is the text, go. Then I interpret what they do when it comes back. Pete Nowalk and Viola have a very different relationship. There is a writer in Viola, and Pete loves it. The two of them spend a lot of time discussing story, and Viola pitches a lot of story to him. They talk about story back and forth. He loves her input on where characters are going. Viola pitched the idea of Annalise taking off her wig. They are very collaborative in that way, which is just a different kind of collaboration that works for them. WS: What is your role in the shows that have their own creators? Do you supervise them? RHIMES: I like to say the difference between being the person whose show it is and the person supervising, it’s like being the grandmother—I hold the baby, but I can give the baby back! So I am there for whatever [the creator] needs. If Pete wants me to write a Cicely Tyson scene and he feels unsure about it, I’ll write a Cicely Tyson scene. If Pete wants me to come to the set and talk to him about costumes, I’ll come to the set and talk about costumes. If I need to talk to an actor for [the showrunners on other Shondaland series], I’ll talk to an actor. If it’s just coming to a table read, I’ll come to a table read. If they just want to come down to my office and tell me what they’re going to do with the story, and I’m just a sounding board for them, then I’m a sounding board. If I have to talk to the network for them, I’ll talk to the network. It’s whatever they need to get their job done. Sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes it’s very easy. I’m really about getting people to stand on their own two feet. WS: Tell us about your new show that will premiere midseason.
RHIMES: It’s set in the world of Shakespeare, and I like to say it begins where Romeo and Juliet ends. It’s a little bit like Game of Thrones, but in the world of Shakespeare. It’s a little more grown up than you’d think. And it has a really great element of, we’re not watching the major players; we’re watching the people we didn’t necessarily pay attention to when we were watching Romeo and Juliet. They were the characters who were off to the side. WS: Have you ever felt restricted by Broadcast Standards and Practices, or can there be freedom in having to work within restrictions? RHIMES: I think both. I think there is a certain freedom that comes from having to work within restrictions. You get really creative when you don’t have options. But yes, I’d be lying if I said that sometimes it’s not incredibly frustrating to be hemmed in by rules. I actually don’t think it’s that interesting to have characters cursing, and it’s not that interesting to have ridiculous nudity for no reason whatsoever. But I do think that sometimes the rules of Standards and Practices don’t really have anything to do with the actual reality of anybody’s standards and practices as much as they have to do with things that are very old-fashioned. I find myself a lot of times—and usually I win, so it’s OK—battling someone’s perception of what they believe [viewers] won’t want to see on screen versus what I know is inappropriate to show on screen. Obviously, I don’t want to show nudity, but abortion is a legal procedure in the United States of America. And if a character is having [an abortion] I will fight tooth and nail so we can show it. It’s very interesting that there are these rules that don’t really have anything to do with truth. WS: You’ve gone from writing to showrunning to heading Shondaland. How have you honed your business skills through the years 124 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
and how do you balance the artist in you with the businessperson? RHIMES:Probably by not trying too hard to think about it, and mostly by really paying attention to what is needed from me as a businessperson. At a certain point, it became very clear to me that I needed to be savvy about the business orientation and the budgeting and all the other stuff that goes along with the brand that is Shondaland and basically me, and that the network was making that a piece of their branding. There is a certain amount of press that comes with that, and to have that suddenly be a part of my job felt overwhelming. It was also important to me to be able to lead all these people and do it well. Learning how to do all that was a challenge, but once it was done it was good, and learning how to delegate is a part of that. You surround yourself with people that you really trust, and you lean on them and allow them to do their jobs, as opposed to micromanaging everything. Once I started to do that, I really kept my focus, because the only focus I really should be having is remaining the storyteller. My biggest obligation is to the story of the show and keeping that truth for the audience, whatever that takes. Finding a way to do that was important. WS: You are being honored as MIPCOM’s Personality of the Year. Are there certain accomplishments of which you are most proud? RHIMES: I think I’m probably going to disappoint you by saying I don’t think about any accomplishments at all. I still find it surprising that anybody wants to give me an award at this point. I’m 46 years old; I feel like I just got started. Recently there has been a slate of what appear to be lifetime achievement awards, which makes me feel like people are trying to tell me to stop! I’m worried that’s what the message is! I’m just getting started. I just figured out how to do this job as well as I possibly can. I’m not looking back at anything. This is just the beginning. WS: In your book, Year of Yes, you wrote about feeling a particular connection to the character Cristina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy. Do you feel connected to any of your characters now in a special way? RHIMES: I feel connected to all my characters in a special way. It’s interesting, when I wrote the book I think I was in a particular place with Cristina because I was literally just losing that character. They are all some piece of me. I feel extremely protective of all of them.
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DICK WOLF By Anna Carugati When you are doing dramas you are looking for the things that have conflict and stakes and the highest stakes of all are always life and death. You’ve got the table set every week for horrible, heroic, interesting things to happen.
In a unique blend of a police investigation and courtroom drama, Law & Order, which ran from 1990 to 2010, redefined the procedural and spawned one of the most successful franchises on television. Four years ago, Dick Wolf defied the odds of starting another hit franchise and launched Chicago Fire, followed by Chicago P.D. and Chicago Med. These series are still procedurals, as Wolf remains committed to a format that has built an extremely loyal viewership on NBC through the decades, but the Chicago shows intertwine ongoing character story lines with the action and feature wildly popular crossover episodes. This season, Chicago Justice will premiere, as will the anthology series Law & Order: True Crime and the reality show Law & Order: You the Jury. They join the returning Law & Order: SVU. WS: How did the Chicago franchise come about? WOLF: The franchise started with Fire. The reason we moved to Chicago is that a show called Rescue Me, which was about firefighters in New York after 9/11, had just gone off the air, and I did not want to bring another fire show into New York. Fire is much more of a blue-collar soap opera, and the values first responders live by are exemplified by the attitudes in the Midwest as opposed to the attitudes of the East Coast—specifically Chicago, the heart of the heartland, which is a fairly accurate depiction of those values. Fire was just a desire to do a first-responder show because firemen fascinate me in the abstract. You can’t pay [most] people to run into burning buildings! That’s the bottom line.
WS: How early into the process did you get the idea for Chicago P.D. and then Med? WOLF: While we were shooting the pilot, I was standing on the bridge over the Chicago River and I turned to Peter Jankowski, who runs Wolf Films, and I said, “You know, I think there are two or three more shows here.” When I first mentioned it to Bob Greenblatt [the chairman of NBC Entertainment], about three weeks after Fire went on the air, he said, “It’s a little early, let’s see how this goes.” But P.D. did air the next year. Fire is a blue-collar soap opera, P.D. is sort of a straight-ahead cop show. Med is not reinventing the wheel, but I think we’ve got characters that have not been seen on medical shows, so that’s additive. And Justice is a very complex but straightforward courtroom show. They are all different. People have asked me, Don’t you think you’re making oldfashioned TV? Well, I prefer the term “classic,” but yeah, we are. The NBC audience hasn’t
Law & Order: SVU after Homicide and now Jon Seda and David Eigenberg came to Chicago P.D. [from Chicago Fire. Seda is now joining Chicago Justice.] WS: Are the crossovers a lot more work? WOLF: To do crossovers is a huge, huge pain in the ass! Everybody hates them, but they like the results. WS: And the audience loves them. WOLF: Because they are different, and you don’t get them anyplace else. WS: Fire is more serialized than the others. WOLF: Because it’s more of a soap opera. The action sequences and the weekly stories are wrapped up usually in one episode, but the personal stories continue; relationships like the one between [Matt] Casey and Gabriela continue over years. WS: Actress S. Epatha Merkerson said that when people watch a Dick Wolf show they sit down to be entertained and they get up and they’ve learned something. The Law & Order franchise is often able to illustrate complex issues better than a documentary or a news report.
dick wolf continues to rule the roosT at NBC with four shows under the chicago franchise and three law & order–branded series. changed. I’ve been there for 32 years constantly on the air, and that audience has not changed at all. They still like narrative drama, not crazy about too much serialization, and like to be able to get a complete hour of television when they invest the time to watch. WS: How did the idea of crossover episodes come about? WOLF: I will pat myself on the back along with Tom Fontana, who is probably my oldest friend in the business. This all started 25 years ago with Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street crossovers. We did two of those in two successive seasons, and both of them were the highest-rated shows of both series. So that got filed away for the future—they work! And actor Richard Belzer came over to 126 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
WOLF: Well, thank you. We’re actually conscious of that and trying. The most important element in any show is the writing. The cast is enormously important, but they don’t make up the words. They have to be given the tools to even break out on a show. The storytelling hopefully does educate. The best description of Law & Order was from Sam Waterston, who said the first half is a murder mystery and the second half is a moral mystery. The thing that is gratifying is the number of times I’ve been to New York or Los Angeles or Chicago and have gone to district-attorney or state’s-attorney offices, and first of all, more than 50 percent of the prosecutors now are women and most of them under the age of 35, and they come up and say, I’m a prosecutor because of Law & Order. That’s very satisfying!
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NBCUniversal’s Chicago P.D. WS: Of all the returning series last season, Law & Order: SVU was the only scripted show whose ratings increased. How do you do that, 17 seasons in? WOLF: First of all, Mariska [Hargitay] is one of the only icons on television. She has an enormous following and people do tune in every week. I hope it continues, but it is amazing—the only returning show whose ratings went up. WS: What can you tell us about the brand-new Chicago Justice? WOLF: Interesting show! Philip Winchester stars as the lead prosecutor, and I hate to make these predictions, but I think he could be a huge television star. He is so perfect looking for the role. It’s almost like, Oh come on, really? He is my height, buffed, square-jawed. He looks like an action figure. He’s perfect for the role and he projects intelligence and an internal moral compass. In that sense, his affect is very similar to Sam Waterston’s. WS: How involved are you in each show? Do you read scripts? Do you write episodes? WOLF: I write occasional stories, especially on the newer shows the first year, but I don’t write scripts anymore—no time. But I read every script and watch at least one cut of every episode. WS: There will also be a true-crime anthology series. WOLF: Yes, the Law & Order: True Crime story will be about the Menendez brothers. It will be eight hours. It should be very intense.
WS: And then there is Law & Order: You the Jury. WOLF: That is a reality show, which will feature a civil trial where both sides have agreed to abide by the decision of the jury, which is America—the viewers watching. We will have live voting, and you’ll be able to vote on plaintiff or defendant. WS: Was the first Law & Order originally conceived of as two half-hour shows? WOLF: Back in 1987, you could not give onehour shows away. In syndication, they didn’t want anything but half-hours, so I developed a bunch of shows, Night & Day, Life & Death, Law & Order, that could be split in half. Luckily we never had to do that. WS: Where does your fascination with law enforcement come from? WOLF: My uncle was an FBI agent, so as a boy, 4, 5, 6 years old, that was something that I guess was imprinted on me somehow. WS: And now you are delving into the medical profession with Chicago Med. WOLF: But it’s life and death; it’s the same stakes. WS: The life and death in Med pull you in, but there is a lot of humanity portrayed in the show. WOLF: Andrew Schneider and Diane Frolov are the showrunners on Med. I am so happy that we got them, because I have been trying to get them into the company since they left Northern Exposure—that’s a long time! They’ve worked on the best shows that have 128 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
been on, from The Sopranos to Boardwalk Empire. They are extraordinary writers. We were coming back from Chicago and I asked the two of them, who are married, “How do you know so much about medicine?” Andy said, “My mother and father were both doctors,” and Diane said, “My first husband was a doctor.” So you’re getting a higher level of insight into medical professionals’ emotions and how they feel about what they are doing. It’s pretty satisfying. WS: Is Oliver Platt’s role as a psychiatrist on Med the first time a psychiatrist has been cast in an ER show? How did that come about? WOLF: First of all, I’ve known Oliver for some 20 years. We did a show together called Deadline. WS: I loved that show. Why did they cancel it? WOLF: I have no idea. It was the best firstyear cast I think I’ve ever had on a show. It was extraordinary, and he was great. But when Med started evolving, I asked Oliver, “Do you want to play a shrink?” And he said, “Yeah, but only if I do it right.” He talked to a head psychiatrist who became sort of an advisor for the city of Chicago and learned that there is an amazing number of psychiatrists now in ERs because a huge proportion of people who come into ERs have emotional problems. ED—emotionally disturbed patients. WS: How many actors have appeared on the two franchises? WOLF: At last count, we’ve had 40,000 speaking parts.
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HOWARD GORDON By Anna Carugati complex, more nuanced and more serialized in its storytelling, certainly studio movies have gotten broader, tentpoley and brandsensitive, although independent movies are in their own category. WS: How do you work with writers? I imagine in some shows you are more hands-on and in others you have more of a supervisory role. GORDON: Generally, I’m more involved at the beginning of a show. On 24 I was very involved from the very beginning to the very end. Now that I have a number of shows, I feel like more of a fireman; I go where I’m needed! I stay on in a consigliere kind of way. I think of myself as a showrunner runner, although if the right show came and I decided to run it I would do that as well.
Growing up, Howard Gordon loved television—Star Trek, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Much to the dismay of his parents, he shunned family expectations and set out for Hollywood, with his best friend and later fellow showrunner, Alex Gansa, to be a TV writer. Gordon got his first job writing on Spenser: For Hire, and a few series later joined The X-Files, for which he was also executive producer. Then came the breakout hit 24, followed by Homeland, by which time Gordon had well honed the skills of creating flawed characters, complex situations and edge-of-your-seat adrenaline rushes in story lines that always weave in topics in the news. WS: Over the course of your career, how have you seen the TV landscape change? GORDON: It’s changed in so many ways, in part because of the proliferation of platforms. And viewing has changed with the ability to time-shift. That really started with VHS tapes so many years ago, and has become a real opportunity for creators and consumers. Also, TV is a writers’ medium in a way that film just isn’t and hasn’t been. The film director does have an outsized amount of power and famously hires and fires writers, and is responsible for a narrative experience that tends to be under two hours. The reason a writer gets preeminence in television is that it’s a much longer narrative, so the continuity and creative stewardship are in the writer’s hands. We’re seeing actors and directors migrate from film because the writing is so strong. As television has become more
WS: What have you found to be the keys to assembling a great writers’ room? GORDON: It’s part art, part luck and part hard work. You have to read scripts and stay open to new talent. By definition, being a writer is a very idiosyncratic profession where a writer has a voice and wants to express him or herself very specifically. And the idea of collaborative writing is something that doesn’t come
wrights or emerging writers. And truthfully, I’ve discovered I’m very much a middleaged writer who has worked in many cases with the same people again and again. There is a parochial part to [working with the same people], and for someone like me, [looking for new talent] really requires harder work than I am sometimes willing to do! But I’ve done it, and it’s been very rewarding, finding writers from diverse backgrounds and having the patience to become a mentor to them. WS: What are some of the skills required of a showrunner? GORDON: Showrunning and producing require a certain combination of having a point of view but also being very open to other points of view. It’s a fine line that I’ve found the best showrunners have, which is to say they’ve been open and at the same time closed. They are closed insofar as to protect their vision and their sense of what the show is. One of the things that has become a guiding principle for me is to understand the dramatic questions that you’re asking in the show. You may not have all the answers as the showrunner, but you need to make sure that
HOWARD GORDON HAS EMERGED AS ONE OF AMERICAN TELEVISION’S SUPER-PRODUCERS, WITH A ROSTER THAT INCLUDES HOMELAND AND THE UPCOMING 24: LEGACY. easily to all writers. A talented writer may not do well in that collaborative environment. You have to add your voice, but you also have to subvert your voice somewhat simultaneously to this alchemical process. My best analogy [for a showrunner] is a leader of a band. You have to audition people. Some people don’t work, and some people do. The staff on Homeland is one of the strongest writing staffs I’ve ever been involved in. Everyone has been a showrunner or a show creator and has a certain amount of experience. The proliferation of content even since Homeland started makes it increasingly difficult to find writers with that level of experience and competence. That requires you to look harder and look for newer talent that hasn’t been found yet, whether it’s from the ranks of play130 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
all the people you’ve hired at the very least are asking the same questions. Because you’d be surprised how many times people see so differently something that may seem very clear to you. It’s surprising, like a Rorschach experience. Some people are tone-specific to their own voices. It’s kind of an art, and you know it when you see it. And then you’re lucky when [you assemble the right people in the writers’ room], because in the end, you add something that is greater than the sum of its parts. In terms of the shows I’ve worked on, from The X-Files to 24 to Homeland, they have all been beneficiaries of that one-plusone-equals-three philosophy. WS: How did Tyrant come about, and was that show a hard pitch, given the subject matter?
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I went to Comic-Con and we presented a few scenes from the show and then we had a panel conversation. I felt the audience was positive, but they are a little wait and see, show me what you got. That’s a fair position for them to be in, but it’s going to be interesting to see how it works. Eric Carter is a very different character from Jack Bauer, and I hope the audience gives it a shot.
Twentieth Century Fox’s Homeland. GORDON: Yes, in a way it broke all the rules of conventional wisdom, one being, Don’t set a show outside the United States; that never works. By and large, people have never done that, so that was a hard sell. The fact that it was set in a fictional Muslim country, it almost sounded as if it could be a parody it was so improbable. The idea was pitched to me by Gideon Raff, who created Hatufim [Prisoners of War], the Israeli version of Homeland. I asked Gideon for [a few drafts of the pilot] and wound up developing it myself. All series have to excite me or interest me or make me curious in some very fundamental way. In the case of Homeland, Alex [Gansa] and I were asking ourselves, ten years after 9/11, what do we as a country need to be thinking about? How afraid should we be? Who should we be afraid of? What’s the price of our security? These were the questions that were the primordial soup that Carrie and Saul and Brody sprang from. In the case of Tyrant, on the other side of the world is this region [whose people are] trying to figure out their identity politics, who they are and how colonization, religion and tribalism inform their political lives and their governance. And this story about brothers intrigued me. It was like catnip! I’m really proud it made it to its third season. WS: You’ve mentioned the value of listening and how that feeds your writing process and creative process. GORDON: Somebody once asked me what I am most proud of, and I found myself saying it wasn’t a show or a moment, but it’s the process
of listening—I’ve become a better listener. If you want to become a writer, you have to develop a kind of empathy and compassion for all your characters—the bad guys, the good guys and all the people in between. You come to recognize the complexity of the human experience. So I’ve learned to listen to my characters, how they feel, how they talk, how they think, and it’s translated into my life in other ways. When you’re running a show, when you’re working with writers, you have to hear where they are coming from and why they are saying what they’re saying and why they are writing what they are writing. It demands a kind of patience that doesn’t always come easily to a lot of people. WS: Even though Kiefer Sutherland won’t be involved in 24: Legacy, you’re confident that the narrative structure of the show will continue to attract viewers and do justice to the series? GORDON: The show is a format that is so unique, and what compelled and continues to compel me is the real-time engine that I think is very durable. It’s been a kind of chicken-or-the-egg question, is 24 Jack Bauer or is it real time? For me, it’s been both. This is going to be an experiment in terms of, Can the real-time format sustain a Jack Bauer-less story. I think we’ve found a story that feels contemporary and relevant, and equally importantly, we’ve found an actor, Corey Hawkins, in the role of Eric Carter, and he’s one of the most compelling actors I have ever worked with. He’s extraordinary. He just has that charisma and that thing that makes you want to watch him. 132 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
WS: Are you finding that the new viewing habits of time-shifting and binge-watching are having an impact on how you think of shows and write shows? Or do you just stay true to the story and how they watch is irrelevant? GORDON: It’s not irrelevant. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get the collective attention of an audience. Once upon a time, when you watched week to week, and the audience was bound by when you delivered the show, it allowed a collective experience and buzz, which helped these shows. Now people are binge-watching, which is a gluttonous experience; it’s asynchronous, so it’s very hard [to gather that audience]. In a way, it requires a Game of Thrones or a Homeland, a show like that, that grabs enough people’s attention and compels them to watch the show when it first comes out. I think the bar is higher than it’s ever been, and the math of it is just a challenging experience. And for me, it’s intimidating. I’ll be honest. I haven’t put out a show in a long time, and I’m impressed with the quality of so many of the shows. It’s the opposite of junk food. The food now is great, and there is a lot of it. I’ve been blown away by some of the shows that have been coming from so many voices and so many creators out there. WS: Not to mention there is not enough time to watch everything. GORDON: It’s overwhelming. It’s like going to a restaurant where there are too many things on the menu. The paradox of too much choice becomes not an opportunity but a paralyzing thing. That’s why I find myself when there are so many shows lined up, sometimes I just don’t bother watching anything and read a book! WS: I’ve heard that you hate the writing process but you love having written. Is that true? GORDON: Yes, I carry that long face around with me. It’s not a secret to anyone who knows me.
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VINCE GILLIGAN & PETER GOULD By Kristin Brzoznowski GILLIGAN: We jumped in with both feet, for all the reasons Peter said and, in general, to keep the band together, so to speak. We had a real family of cast and crew that we loved working with for the previous six years, and we wanted to keep that group together. We jumped in without really looking where we were jumping, and AMC and Sony were both wonderful to us. They said, We support your desire to do this…now, what’s the show going to be? Then we looked at each other and said, Uh-oh! [Laughs] In those early days we thought it might be a half-hour comedy. Then we thought, What do we know about half-hour comedies? Not much! So, we started thinking about, Is it a sequel? Is it a prequel? Through trial and error, we wound up with what we are doing now.
Peter Gould
Vince Gilligan
Saul Goodman first appeared as the fast-talking lawyer for notorious meth-maker Walter White on the hit AMC series Breaking Bad. With the show’s conclusion came the opportunity for Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould to explore Saul’s story in full, looking back to a time when he was a small-time attorney named Jimmy McGill, hustling his way through life. This was the basis for Better Call Saul, a spin-off prequel to Breaking Bad, again in partnership with AMC and Sony Pictures Television. Gilligan and Gould are coshowrunners on the crime drama–black comedy hybrid, which has been renewed for a third season. WS: Coming off the success of Breaking Bad, did you initially have reservations about doing what’s billed as a prequel series? GILLIGAN: Oh boy, did we! [Laughs] GOULD: We had nothing but reservations! There was a tremendous temptation to do this show, mostly because we loved working with Bob [Odenkirk, who plays Saul]. Speaking for myself, I loved working with Vince on Breaking Bad; it was the great creative experience of my professional life. We both wanted to keep the good thing going. At the same time, we were so proud of how we ended Breaking Bad—it felt like it ended at just the right moment—and it was so gratifying to see how people took to the show. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I was worried that this show would always be in the shadow of its more successful predecessor. I also had the fear, and I don’t think I ever expressed it to Vince, that if this was a big fat belly flop it would all land at my doorstep, since I was the different element in this new piece.
WS: Why did the character of Saul Goodman stand out for a spin-off? GOULD: Breaking Bad had so many wonderful, larger-than-life characters. There wasn’t really a logical process for why [we chose] Saul Goodman except that he was so very different from Walter White. In a lot of ways, he was Walter White’s opposite. Whereas Walt was a man with nothing left to lose, Saul had a lot left to lose. Saul seemed to be skating over the
GILLIGAN: That’s something that occupies [our minds] constantly. It really is a question of proportion. There’s always an underlying question of proportion with any TV show, which is: How long should this show exist? How much story do we have? We have that going on all the time as the eternal question of Better Call Saul. As Jimmy McGill gets closer and closer to becoming Saul Goodman, we, therefore, get closer and closer to the world of Breaking Bad. So the other question that goes along with it is, how should we parcel out these appearances with characters from Breaking Bad? There’s no good answer to it! It’s a case-by-case feeling that we have in the [writers’] room. We don’t want to overdo it. Sometimes you have to deny yourself, and we realize that all the time in the writers’ room. We could throw Breaking Bad characters into this willy-nilly, but at a certain point it would be counterproductive; it would do the opposite of what we always want to do, which is to satisfy the audience. A little goes a long way with some of these encounters in the world of Better Call Saul. WS: With it being a prequel, we know the fate of some of these characters. Does that limit your storytelling ability?
BETTER CALL SAUL haS set THE benchmark for WHAT A prequeL CAN BE, introducING A NEW UNIVERSE OF CHARACTERS WHILE ALSO MAINTAINING THREADS TO BREAKING BAD. surface of the world, whereas Walt was deep, deep underwater. We wanted to do something that was a change of pace. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t doing Breaking Bad part two. That was one of the things I really admired about how Vince handled the end of the show. There was an appetite in the world and all of us who worked on the show would have happily done more seasons, but the story concluded. We didn’t want to make this a backdoor way to continue the story. We wanted to try something that would have a different tone, and this show does have an unusual tone. WS: How do you strike a balance between drawing from Breaking Bad and introducing new characters and story lines? 134 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
GILLIGAN: It does indeed limit things, but limits are not always bad. They make you work harder as a storyteller. We endeavor to be very precise and accurate in terms of how this show dovetails with what we know about the characters, and not just their fates but how they thought and who we knew them to be. Once it’s all said and done, we want nothing more than this to be an enormous experience with many different layers to it, a universe that you can visit in any order. I love the thought that in the future some people will experience the Breaking BadBetter Call Saul universe by watching one or the other first. We want this to work from both ends, to be approachable from either direction. WS: What’s the creative atmosphere like in the writers’ room?
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GILLIGAN: We always want to keep the conversation going. We want to enjoy each other’s company and have as much fun breaking stories as we can. It’s a very positive and helpful thing that we all like one another. We spend ten hours a day together in this room, so we want to make it as pleasant an environment as possible. I also always thought that it needed to be a safe environment. People need to be able to speak up without censoring themselves or editing what they’re about to say. Everyone in there, Peter and I included, needs to be able to speak up with the ideas that we have at that moment and not feel any fear that people might think it’s stupid or that it wouldn’t work. Indeed, not every idea works, but, oddly enough, some of the dumbest ideas have led to some of the best flashes of creativity! There’s an old saying: There is no such thing as a bad idea. That cliché happens to be true when you realize that that bad idea can lead to the best idea. You need someone else to twist it just a little bit and turn it into something completely new. It’s very much a group effort, and we want it to be collaborative. The best possible moments are when we come up with ideas and pay no attention to who came up with them. A day or a week later we have a great scene or bit of dialogue and we honestly can’t remember who came up with it. It’s amazing what you can get accomplished when nobody is jockeying for credit.
the collaboration. The basis is that it comes from mutual respect. I’ve never worked with anyone as creative as Vince, and he’s a genuinely nice guy! He really cares about the people he works with; that makes an enormous difference. GILLIGAN: It’s good to keep the conversation going. I’ve been in writers’ rooms in the past where there were 5, 10, 20 minutes of silence. That’s never happened in our writers’ rooms on Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. We’ve endeavored to not let that happen. We’ve had maybe at most 30 seconds or a minute’s worth of silence once in a blue moon. Sometimes what you’re trying to find is the shape of the scene or a certain rhythm; it’s almost like composing music. Sometimes literally saying “Blah, blah, blah” or “Yadda, yadda, yadda” helps to keep things percolating!
WS: What is the working dynamic like between the two of you? Have you developed a confidence and shorthand now after being longtime collaborators? GOULD: The great thing is that Vince created an atmosphere on Breaking Bad that continues on this show and continues between us. I feel like we can say anything to each other. We can float any idea, no matter how crazy or seemingly stupid, because we know we’re not going to be judged. We both value the conversation around keeping things moving forward. There are times when one of us is acting more like an editor and the other is spouting off, and vice versa. There are times when Vince goes on a run and I or the rest of the people in the room will find a way to sand off some of the edges. When it’s working, and it usually does, it’s very pleasurable. On the other hand, there are a lot of moments, and sometimes long hours, when we feel stuck and like the way forward is not clear. That’s when it’s really wonderful to have collaborators who can remind you that you’ve been in this position before and will find a way out of it. That is a lot of the pleasure of the process and
WS: Do you think AMC has allowed for more creative freedom with Saul since you’ve already delivered them a success? GILLIGAN: Yes, AMC has given us a lot of freedom now, but the wonderful thing about them and Sony is that they’ve given us freedom from the get-go. Peter and I have both worked with different studios and networks where they will drown you with notes and inundate you with laundry lists of what you can and cannot do. When we got going on Breaking Bad, a very real question at that time was, Can a show exist in which the main character is an absolute shit heel, a terrible, murderous person! And has a death sentence! To be fair, The Sopranos paved the way for Breaking Bad and The Shield did as well. The Sopranos begat The Shield and The Shield begat Breaking Bad, so it’s not as if we forged any utterly new territory, but it was still a pretty novel idea [at the time]. Sony and AMC both, to their credit, didn’t blink. They let us tell the story we wanted to tell. We don’t have any more freedom now than we did then, which is to say that we’ve had freedom throughout.
Sony Pictures Television’s Better Call Saul.
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GOULD: It’s important to emphasize that even before the show was a hit—and Breaking Bad was not that well known for the first few seasons—AMC and Sony really gave Vince and everyone on the show a lot of creative freedom. That’s more impressive than [getting that freedom] after something becomes a success. It’s a bit like getting married to someone back when you’re poor; if you stick together through thick and thin it makes the success all the more delicious. WS: Do you already know how you’re going to connect the dots over to where Saul Goodman enters the Breaking Bad world? GILLIGAN: We’re still figuring it out. I’d love to say that we knew from the beginning how it’s all going to play out, but literally what we do every day in the writers’ room is chip away at it. It’s like a giant hunk of marble and we’re picking off tiny chips day by day. Hopefully underneath it all is the Pietà. We’ll find out! [Laughs] All joking aside, we’ll find out when everyone else does, since we really are figuring it out a bit at a time. Not because that’s the way we like to do it, but because that’s the way it works. Breaking Bad was the same way. When we were cracking away at the final 16 episodes, I was very nervous about where it was going to end up and particularly nervous that we wouldn’t wind up with a satisfying conclusion. If we had known [years before] where it was all going to end, it wouldn’t have led to as good an ending. Sometimes if you know years in advance, it locks you in and you wind up in a rut, just heading toward the inevitable. Nothing was ever inevitable storywise on Breaking Bad. Certain things are a little bit more inevitable on Better Call Saul, but less so than what we originally thought. We know that Jimmy McGill becomes Saul Goodman, a lawyer with a crazy office, but there’s a lot of room for invention and we’re inventing every day and hopefully taking the show into more and more interesting areas.
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SAM ESMAIL By Anna Carugati ESMAIL: I tried not to let it influence how I approached season two. The temptation was to replicate what we did in season one but with more bells and whistles. I wanted to avoid that as much as possible, because I felt that I had a duty to stay true to Elliot’s journey and what he’s going through. I liken it to if the whole series were a movie, [season two is] the second 30 minutes of that movie. We’re continuing on the path that we had started in the first season, remaining with that through line and staying as honest as we can to Elliot’s journey. We hoped people would jump on board and be as engaged with it as we are.
When Mr. Robot premiered, last summer, it drew viewers into the dark and largely unknown underground world of computer hackers and quickly catapulted to the top of the list of must-watch shows. Created by Sam Esmail, the series tackles issues such as cyber security and the alienating impact of technology on our lives as seen through the eyes of Elliot Alderson, a brilliant but psychologically damaged computer programmer who moonlights as a vigilante hacker, masterfully played by Rami Malek. Esmail is not only the showrunner; he also directed every episode of season two, which recently ended its run on USA Network. His unconventional shooting style and his very specific visual grammar, coupled with the intricate plot, have made Mr. Robot unique in the television landscape. WS: Where did the idea for Mr. Robot come from? Were there real-life events that served as inspiration for the series? ESMAIL: Yes, I would say there were three forces at play that motivated me to write the story. One is that growing up as a tech nerd, I was always a little frustrated at how we were represented in film and TV. I always wanted to tell a more accurate story representing that culture, specifically the hacker culture. The other two real-life events that came into play were the financial crisis of 2008 and the Arab Spring. Those were the events that began to form the main character of Elliot Alderson and what that journey was going to be like for him. WS: Did the success of season one influence how you approached season two?
WS: I understand you did not shoot season two as a typical episodic TV series. ESMAIL: We shot it more like a feature. In television, it’s called block shooting. It’s essentially how you would shoot a feature when you go to a location and shoot all the scenes that are at that location and then move to the next location. And that’s just for efficiencies of production. In features, that’s done all the time. But in television it’s obviously a little bit more overwhelming in terms of the work because you are talking about, in our case, 12 scripts, 12 hours of content. Some-
little bit. Rather than me having to articulate every week to a different person what the tone of the show is and where the arc is in that episode, I was able to direct every episode, and we were able to streamline that whole process. WS: Since you were block shooting, did you sit down with the actors ahead of time so they understood the whole story arc from the beginning, or were they just given the parts of the story they needed to shoot each day? ESMAIL: For this to work, we had to shoot it like a feature, so we had written all the scripts beforehand. And even before I wrote all the scripts, I called all our main leads and ran them through their whole story line for the whole season, just to get their feedback, their thoughts. After that, when we finished all the scripts, I brought all the actors in and we did two days of table reads where we read through the entire season. WS: Were the roles of Elliot and Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) difficult to cast? ESMAIL: Absolutely. In the case of Elliot, what’s hard about a character like his is that he can be very cerebral and very inward. And
HAILED AS THE BEST NEW U.S. CABLE SERIES IN THE LAST YEAR, MR. ROBOT HAS DAZZLED WITH PLOT TWISTS AND INNOVATIVE VISUALS AS IT EXPLORES THE WORLD OF CYBER HACKERS. times we are at a location for a week or even a week and a half to shoot all the scenes from all the episodes for the entire season. WS: You chose to direct all the episodes of season two. I’m sure that just being a showrunner is a ton of work. How did you add directing to your plate as well? ESMAIL: I run the show very differently than most showrunners in that the filming part of it is actually a huge priority for me. It’s not necessarily the writing, but how we are going to adapt that screenplay into what we are going to see on the screen. But even in the first season, I was basically on set every day, as much as I could be. So the transition to directing every episode in the second season wasn’t that farfetched because it streamlined the process a 136 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
there is a juvenile, obnoxious side to him when he goes off on his rants. It’s very hard to act like that and find the humanity in that. We went through a lengthy audition process. When Rami came in it was clear that he embodied that humanity that we were looking for. He did the fsociety scene from the first season, and instead of coming off didactic, he came off as a person who is incredibly vulnerable and in a lot of pain, and that is exactly what we needed. He also put a lot of warmth into a character that can come off as cold. Rami is brilliantly able to add that warmth as another layer on top of it. He is just outstanding. As far as Christian is concerned, that was a no-brainer, because although I didn’t consciously do this as I was writing the character of Mr. Robot, I’m a huge fan of Christian’s
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NBCUniversal’s Mr. Robot. work, from Pump Up the Volume to Heathers to True Romance. I have to say the Mr. Robot character in a lot of ways shares a lot of similarities with Christian’s anarchist characters in Heathers and Pump Up the Volume. So when his name came up, it was pretty clear that he could be amazing in this part. WS: What themes did you want to explore in seasons one and two? ESMAIL: There are a lot of themes at play, everything from how modern society functions in the context of technology to how delusional we are in terms of the control we have in our lives. And then it runs from a family drama, obviously Elliot and Darlene, brother and sister, and a childhood friend, Angela, to how they are disconnected. But honestly, at the heart of it all, I think we are exploring the theme of loneliness. The deepest theme is that despite technology and all the positive things it brings in connecting us, maybe we are actually more disconnected [than we realize]. WS: With all the scenes of coding on computers, was it important to you to be accurate, and what reaction did you receive from the hacker community? ESMAIL: Luckily enough we have received very high marks from the hacker community. And yes, accuracy was incredibly important. It’s one of the priorities I had going into telling a story about this culture—I would be as authentic as possible in representing not just the hacking but the hackers and [how to be a hacker]. Part of [it was] looking at Elliot’s character and his anti-establishment rants (and that mentality is present in the hacker culture) but on the flip side, the screens had
to be accurate, what they were attempting to do had to be accurate. And often we go through painstaking lengths in production to make sure that everything that is shown on screen is as true to life as possible. WS: I understand you don’t use green screens. When Elliot is at the computer, Rami is actually typing in code? ESMAIL: Yes, he has to type what we see on screen. And the reason for that is twofold. One is the screens have to be built beforehand; we can’t start making up stuff in code. And two, Rami can see what he’s doing. When an actor is just staring at a green screen, and he’s just miming something— even though he doesn’t actually know what he’s reading anyway in code—there is a sense that it’s not authentic. WS: Your shooting style is different compared to other series. ESMAIL: I grew up watching a lot of movies and of course I learned a lot from those movies, and that obviously still influences how I think about shooting a scene, how I visually construct a scene. The other side is that I read a lot of film criticism growing up; that was my film school when I was young. I learned a lot about how things would work, how a frame could tell a story more than the dialogue or more than the script, how music and production design and all the different elements make a shot work. Those two things form my visual style. WS: Tell me about your relationship with USA Network. They seem to have given you a lot of freedom with this show. 138 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
ESMAIL: I can’t speak more highly of USA. I have no idea why they even let me do half the stuff I’ve done on this show, but it’s a testament to the courage and the trust that they have not just in me, but in everybody on our production. I am extremely grateful for their support and their collaboration because they get involved in the best way possible and jump in when they feel that they can be helpful creatively. That’s all great. WS: You are very knowledgeable, but do you have tech consultants on the show, too? ESMAIL: Oh yes. Not only do we have a writer who is very well-versed in cyber security, but we have also had a couple of tech [consultants], one who actually works for a cyber-security firm and another who used to be in the FBI working in the cyber squad. So we have two people from different backgrounds. WS: Did you imagine when you started incubating this idea that hacking would show up in the news as prominently and often as it does these days? ESMAIL: Honestly, when I first wrote it, hacking still wasn’t [prominent in the news], although I always read up on those stories. [The hacker group] Anonymous had made a bit of a name for itself, but it wasn’t really in the public conversation. After we shot the pilot, the day that we got picked up [by USA Network], the Sony hack happened. And then President Obama talked about it in the State of the Union address, and that’s when it started to kick into high gear in the public conversation.
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SCOTT M. GIMPLE By Mansha Daswani makes the weird or the funny or the strange stuff that much stranger and funnier and weirder. But it also makes the hard stuff that much harder. There is absolutely hope in this world. But it does not seem like it all the time. The characters have to find it.
More than 18 million people in the U.S. tuned in to The Walking Dead’s jaw-dropping season six finale this past spring. The episode—which ended with new villain-in-chief, Negan, brutally killing an as-yet-undisclosed core character— marked The Walking Dead’s fourth consecutive year as the number one show among adults 18 to 49. Since 2013, Scott M. Gimple has been the showrunner of the AMC original, which airs on FOX feeds across the globe. An ardent fan of the graphic novel on which The Walking Dead is based and a writer on the show since season two, Gimple discusses season six’s shocking cliff-hanger, opinionated fans and managing basic-cable’s biggest hit. WS: What can you reveal about what’s in store for season seven? GIMPLE: I can tell you very little about the beginning of the season. I can say that however brutal and painful the start of the story is, that is just the start. It is Krypton exploding [for Superman], it is Thomas and Martha Wayne being shot [for Batman], it is Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru dying [for Luke Skywalker]—it is the trauma that sets our characters into motion. WS: The trailer released this summer indicated that there would still be some comedic moments, as there have always been in the show, despite the brutal beginning. GIMPLE: There’s a lot of variety to the stories we are telling. Some of it is very hard, but it isn’t all very hard, and I think that
WS: Coming back after that gut-wrenching cliff-hanger, how was the first table read? GIMPLE: We don’t do table reads that often. [Our production schedule] makes it difficult to do them. For the first episode, we always do one because we haven’t started production yet, so we have an opportunity to. All the actors are there and there are executives from AMC and a lot of production staff. For me, it is a very heavy thing. These are very visual stories, so it feels a little funny to do a table read—I am not sure how everything is going to fly. This table read was very intense because everyone knew what was coming—everyone had read the script. At the end of the table read, there was dead silence, punctuated by people crying. Everyone sitting there was just destroyed. There’s a sense that the story was successful in that it was
WS: Online, many fans were unhappy with the cliff-hanger, upset that they would have to wait six months before finding out who had been killed by Negan. Have viewers become impatient in this era of bingewatching? GIMPLE: The only reaction you get to measure is the online reaction—it takes too long to walk down the street and ask people! It is a pretty techno-savvy group [of fans], so there might be some [impatience]. The audience is the supreme court. How they feel is how they feel, and their feelings are valid. I guess in my mind, if anybody felt that intense about it and that intense about the show, hopefully that is a product of them liking the show a lot. WS: How do you run your writers’ room and develop story arcs? GIMPLE: It has been evolving. I’m not a gigantic fan of the room, and I’m not a big fan of walking into the room and going, “What we are doing?” Especially with a show that is based on something that a) I started reading before the TV show existed, and b) there are 157 issues [of the comic, and counting] to draw off of. In general, I
THE WALKING DEAD IS THE HIGHEST-RATED BASIC-CABLE SERIES IN THE U.S. AND RULES SOCIAL MEDIA, GENERATING MORE THAN 400,000 TWEETS PER EPISODE. powerful, or hopefully it was, but it is a strange thing because you have a lot of very sad people all around you. It is the starting point for the characters. It is the starting point for the audience. How do you go on from this? This is a TV show that is part horror, part survival. In a horror movie, the movie ends and you don’t need to know how the characters go on, that isn’t the story. But in [The Walking Dead], the stories that we tell are about how we reach the apex of trauma, of horror, of things that are very, very difficult, and how these characters continue. How they can continue with a life that is real, that has friendship, that has love, that has the possibilities of smiles, after they go through something so terrible. 140 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
have had a plan and trajectories for the characters for a very long time. Year to year I present to the writers what I hope to do, the general story. Then it is really about them kicking the tires and helping me finesse the whole thing. It is only the first few weeks, when the writers start, that we are intensely together. So many great ideas to heighten what I’m hoping to see come out of that. The [writers are] making connections, playing with the timing of things and some of the characters involved. Then it becomes a very individual [collaboration] between me and the writer or me and Angela Kang, my number two, and the writer. There is a lot of jumping back and forth. I drive the breaking and turn it over to the writer. The
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AMC & Fox Networks Group’s The Walking Dead.
Characters affect each other. It’s all about the relationships. WS: Visual effects play a significant role in the show. How do you manage that aspect of the production process? GIMPLE: Visual effects have been such an enormous part of the show since the beginning. When I took this job, I think they became an even bigger part of the show. We have an incredibly talented group of people doing that who do work tirelessly, and it is something that I heavily involve myself with, to everyone’s exhaustion. Whether it’s a blood splatter or an explosion, it has to be as real as possible to keep the audience engaged. The more invisible a visual effect is, the more effective it is. We have some geniuses working on the show. I work them very hard because [if I were not making the show] I would be the viewer on the internet talking about it!
writer tweaks it, and Angela tweaks it, and we go back and forth, and other writers might chime in because of other episodes they are working on. I will say that I still do not feel that I have at all come close to cracking the code on how to do it! [Laughs] But the writers are enormously talented and enormously patient with me. It is a small group, and we have all known each other a while now, and they are very cool to deal with my insanity. It is a bit of a crazy way to do it. We jump back and forth [between Los Angeles and the set in] Georgia. Sometimes we are sitting in a room in Georgia and sometimes we are here [in L.A.]. Sometimes we are on the phone. Sometimes I have been communicating with a writer every other day, but I have not seen him for weeks and weeks. Luckily we have worked with each other a while, so there’s a comfort with each other. Also, there’s Robert [Kirkman, creator of the Walking Dead graphic novel] on top of all that. Robert is not just a writer; he is an executive producer, he is somebody I lean on in very global things. At the beginning
of the season, I do this global break on my own, and I usually sit down with Robert at one point and kick things around as to the directions I am going in. So much of it is his work that I am just remixing. I like circling back with him and showing him how I have recut the record, but it is usually his song. WS: You mentioned having a small group of writers, yet the scope of the series in terms of characters and locations has grown tremendously from season to season. GIMPLE: A lot of [the story lines and characters are] drawn from the comics. There are some things that the comics just mention, and there are so many characters, so we can extrapolate. We take the basis of what’s there, and we don’t completely go off in a new direction unless that new direction somehow serves to circle back to the greater story. We make sure that each of the characters has a voice and a direction to go in, an emotional arc. You work that out before anything else and then you connect it with the other characters and move them towards their arcs. 142 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
WS: Your fans are very, very vocal, and of course have their favorite characters who, from time to time, are killed off. How do you cope with that experience, of frequently losing core cast members? GIMPLE: It’s an incredibly wonderful, warm, professional group of people that I am working with that I don’t ever want to part from. The people we have lost are people I enjoyed working with, people I counted as friends. Nobody is [really] dying, but [losing cast members is] enormously difficult. It’s a very emotional thing. I do look at these people and think that they are going to have so many opportunities. There are so many people that have left the show and gone on to do such great things. But you do want to work with them. You want to have them playing in your band. They are all so talented. This is a show that purposely shoots itself in the foot every few episodes by losing people who are critical, but that is part of the world that Robert created. He has done it himself in the book with such great characters that people have enjoyed that disappear in an instant. WS: I am both looking forward to and dreading that first episode of season seven! GIMPLE: And you should! Have loved ones close. Put your affairs in order. Also, know that it isn’t the end; it really is the beginning. It’s a painful beginning, but it’s a beginning.
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JON BOKENKAMP By Anna Carugati season will be. Then we map out as much of the season as we can and fill in the blanks. It’s a little bit like looking at the map and figuring out how you’re going to get from New York to Los Angeles using only highways, and picking five or six towns that you’re going to stop in on the way—and then throwing away the map and finding your way to those signposts along the way. It’s an evolving process, but we do work backward from knowing where we’re going to end in a season, and then ultimately with the series, to gauge where our storytelling should be.
The Blacklist was a breakout hit when it premiered on NBC in 2013 and has remained one of the highest-rated shows on the network. Creator and executive producer Jon Bokenkamp has crafted a unique hybrid of a procedural and a serialized show that focuses on Raymond “Red” Reddington, played by James Spader, a criminal mastermind and a former government agent who collaborates with the FBI to help them catch the most nefarious outlaws, but insists on working only with agent Elizabeth Keen, played by Megan Boone. The series blends fast-paced action with insightful analysis of flawed characters, constantly leading viewers to ask what is right and what is wrong. WS: What is your process for breaking stories? BOKENKAMP: It’s an evolving process, because we’re still figuring out how to write the show. I know you’re not supposed to have an “end” in television—it’s never supposed to end—but we are working toward an endgame and an ultimate truth in the show, and that is our guidepost as far as how much we dole out each season. For example, in season three, we knew that we were starting with Elizabeth Keen on the run, we knew that we were going to have to exonerate her and then [provide] another turn toward the end of the season. Typically we land on the three or four signposts of what we’re going to do, so we know where we’re starting, we know what our fall cliff-hanger will be, we know there will be a big turn in the back half of the season, and we know what the end of the
WS: When Megan Boone told you she was pregnant, you had a choice between writing the pregnancy into the show or shooting around it. How was the decision made to keep the pregnancy in the show? BOKENKAMP: Well, babies in shows are supposed to be kind of show-killers, and there was legitimate concern from the studio and the network. [So we had to decide] if we wanted to embrace that, or have her carry around plotted plants and stand behind furniture! It didn’t take long for John [Eisendrath, executive producer] and me to
much seriousness. He has a very strange, weird sense of humor that makes me laugh almost daily, and we’ve learned to write to that. We’ve learned to write to all the actors in a different way. James puts a lot of thought into, What would really happen? Who would Red be? At the beginning of season three, he and Elizabeth Keen had escaped—they were in this secret apartment, and we didn’t know where they were, and we find out that they’re in a shipping container, and that was a thought that James had. He said, “You know, I feel like Red would probably have a shipping container somewhere that is decked out and has electricity and food and wine, and if he ever just needs to disappear, he could just go live in a shipping container for two months.” It’s absurd, but it’s awesome! That episode is one of my favorites of last season because it’s super emotional and quirky, and it’s fun and different. You don’t get to see people living in shipping containers on most cop shows! James gets inside that character and has a perspective about him, but is incredibly fair and generous and a real collaborator.
THE BLACKLIST HAS BEEN SUCH A HIT FOR NBC THAT THE NETWORK IS EXTENDING THE BRAND WITH A NEW SERIES IN 2017, THE BLACKLIST: REDEMPTION. decide that we had to embrace it. It’s a show about a woman who is trying to understand who she is, and she wanted nothing more than to have a baby in the pilot of the series, and now she has a baby! How do we [back] away from that? It was great to land on the fact even though it scared us a little bit. It was the right thing to do to just embrace the pregnancy. WS: What has James Spader brought to the character of Red? BOKENKAMP: James says that he saw this in the original script when he first read it. I’ve always felt like he’s brought more humor to the role than I imagined. If it were just me working in a vacuum, it would probably be a pretty boring show with far too 144 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
I have no experience on television outside of The Blacklist, but I can only imagine there are a number of shows where the leads only care how they look or how they come off or how they sound. The only thing that matters to James is, ultimately, the script, and making sure that the story is right. He doesn’t care if he looks ridiculous or if we’re poking fun at Red— he’s up for that, and I think that is a real testament to how important he is to the show. He’s willing to go anywhere for it. WS: Red is unquestionably a criminal, but there are so many times that we see a side of him that is totally human. How do you strike that balance, not only with Red but with a lot of the other characters, that nobody is entirely good nor entirely bad?
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ideas, and trying to land on unique and special Blacklisters. WS: Do you believe that a Cabal-like organization does exist in real life? BOKENKAMP: I guess the short answer is yes. I’m far too cynical to believe that the American political system, or any political system, for that matter, is what it appears. I drive through Hollywood and I see old buildings being torn down and giant buildings being put up, and you see how capitalism drives far more than just politics—I think it is a very murky world. There’s a lot of backscratching that goes on that bothers me, so, yeah, I think there’s a lot of truth to it. I wish there weren’t.
Sony Pictures Television’s The Blacklist. BOKENKAMP: Well, that is part of the show, and it’s part of my worldview. The world is a very gray place and the characters are flawed in very real ways and are struggling with real problems like all of us are. Some of the strongest moments in the show have been where you see that Reddington, who is an incredibly violent and dangerous man, has real wounds and he’s scared. One of the most interesting questions, for me, is, What scares Raymond Reddington? What is he afraid of? Those moments now and then, where we see—and James plays it so well— the heartbreak that his character has endured and is enduring, those are some of my favorite stories. So, yes, it is a real balancing act. But again, that’s one of the things he brings to the show—humor. In the first season, he poured vodka all over a guy and was going to light him on fire using his cigar, and said, “Ah! The suspense is killing me!” and shot him instead! But it’s so easy to like this very dangerous and horrible man who has humanity and his own moral code. That’s what’s interesting, and that’s where
we go to when we’re on that very fine line. What is Red’s moral code? He has a very specific set of beliefs that is sometimes very difficult to wrestle down, but that is usually our guidepost. WS: Are the Blacklisters based on any reallife people, or are they amalgams of different kinds of people? BOKENKAMP: The Blacklisters come from all over the place. There was a real “Stewmaker” who got rid of bodies for a drug cartel—just the idea of that was an inspiration. There have been other pieces that are grafted together; things that we read in the newspaper or find online. We’re not a “ripped from the headlines” show, but the things that are happening in the world [do influence us]. I often feel like the stuff that’s happening in the real world is far stranger than anything that we could come up with in the writers’ room. So we pick stuff and then try to weird it up a little bit and heighten it, but truthfully we have a room of incredibly talented writers who are always kicking around 146 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
WS: How did The Blacklist: Redemption come about? Did NBC ask for another show, or do you have more story to tell? BOKENKAMP: It’s definitely about having more story to tell. We talked for a while about what a spin-off of the show would be. I didn’t want it to be a duplicate of The Blacklist. If we did something it would need to stand on its own, be its own world, populated with its own people who are distinct and different from The Blacklist. It’s a little bit of an older template of a spinoff, [like] The Jeffersons or Maude, where one of the characters leaves that world and takes us into another one, rather than doing The Blacklist: Chicago. We’re smart enough to know that James Spader does his very specific thing—we’re not trying to duplicate that. I think Famke [Janssen, who plays Susan “Scottie” Hargrave] is incredibly talented and unique in her own way, and Ryan [Eggold, who plays Tom Keen], same thing; we’ve got a great cast. It will feel and smell like The Blacklist, and I think the things that audiences like about The Blacklist— the pace and the tone—may be similar. But I also think it’s going be a little sexier and a little more fun, and a little more of a spy show versus The Blacklist, which is really a crime drama. WS: So you envision viewers who might step into the show who haven’t seen The Blacklist and still will be able to enjoy it? BOKENKAMP: Oh, 100 percent. I think that’s critical to it being of any interest. I hope the Blacklist audience will be interested, because they know some of these characters, but to me it is completely its own show.
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NOAH HAWLEY By Mansha Daswani
Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 masterpiece, Fargo, opens with the lines, “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” While there is still confusion about Fargo’s basis in fact, there has been no doubt about the film’s legacy. With the FX series of the same name, creator and showrunner Noah Hawley pays homage to the Coen brothers, taking the world of Fargo into brand-new “true” stories. The indemand writer—who just released a new novel and who has an overall deal with FX Networks—weighs in on managing multiple story lines against a wintry backdrop in Fargo. WS: How did Fargo come to be a series for FX? HAWLEY: FX and MGM had had a conversation about doing it. There was no writer attached. I had worked at FX before, and they asked me what I thought about turning Fargo into a series. I thought about it and said, “I don’t think it’s a television series because of the way the movie ended. Marge [Gunderson, the local police chief in the movie] solved this crazy Coen brothers case and then tomorrow was going to be her reward, so if she woke up tomorrow and there was another crazy Coen brothers case, it would lose its poignancy, and you also wouldn’t be able to call it a true story.” I said it could be an anthology series, where every year is a truth-isstranger-than-fiction story. They liked that idea. WS: Were you inspired solely by Fargo or by any of the other works by the Coen brothers?
HAWLEY: It’s all in there. The film itself, the sensibility of it, is the driving factor, but one of the things that make their work so unique is how inventive they are cinematically and in tone, and with structure and point of view. Taking a two-hour movie and turning it into a ten-hour story, we needed a dramatic infrastructure that was larger—we needed more moving pieces. When you’re going to your canon of material, you have to expand past Fargo [the movie], because it’s a single story that addresses what it addresses. It’s our goal not just to write scripts that feel like Coen brothers scripts, but to make a [ten-episode] movie that feels like a Coen brothers movie. You can’t always answer that with direct correlations, so you have to trust your instincts.
to February and we didn’t wrap till June, we just didn’t have time to write and prep the show to shoot last winter. And winter is an important component. So I said, “We need to take the year and make the show as good as it can be.” Luckily, the network agreed. If it is an anthology series, if it is an event and it’s not a TV series in the way that everything else is a television series, then you don’t have to hit that same airdate every year. The minute you are hitting that same airdate every year, how are you not just a TV series? We’re going to take our time. It was crazy that we made something the first year that people loved and crazier that we managed to do it again by doing something completely different. The degree of difficulty just gets harder, so why wouldn’t you take the time to get it right?
WS: Why did you decide to make season two, set in 1979, a prequel of sorts to season one, which was set in 2006? Will there be characters we’re already familiar with in season three? HAWLEY: I wasn’t 100 percent sure if I wanted 1979 to be the second season or the third season, but I knew that if we laid in references to an earlier story it might pique the audiences’ interest. I thought that was a good thing to do in solidifying the second year of a show, to create
WS: Tell us about your writers’ room. How do you break stories? How do you determine which episodes you’ll write yourself? HAWLEY: It’s an interesting process. We’ve learned that there are certain facets of how you tell a story like this that are essential components. You need a certain amount of moving pieces, and certainly we had many more in our second year. Because you’re saying this is a true story, a certain amount of randomness is essen-
Inspired by the oscar-winning feature film of the same name, fargo has been racking up awards since its 2014 debut, including two primetime emmys. some continuity on that level. Even though it’s a completely different story, it has some connection. Now that the show is established, we’ll reinvent it; this third year is not connected directly to either the movie or the first two years of the show. It’s more of a stand-alone story. That said, there will be a few connections. WS: Season three is not set to air till 2017, more than a year after season two wrapped. Why was it important to give yourself that long gap between seasons? HAWLEY: We found this recipe for making the show in the first year that we repeated the second year: we break the show and write it entirely before it’s filmed. That’s essential. Every step is leading toward the end of the story. Because our second year of production moved 148 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
tial. If you have a number of moving pieces on a collision course, you’re never exactly sure which ones are going to collide and when. You’re in something that is a little more unpredictable. In a writers’ room, there are a lot of times where I’ll hear a great pitch for a twist, but it feels like a movie twist, it feels like something that doesn’t ring true in a real-life way. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a big action set piece or a moment of betrayal that’s hugely satisfying, but it needs to have a certain unpredictability to it. So a lot of what I do with the writers is that kind of thing. It does start for me very much thematically. The first year was really about civilization in the wilderness and this idea of a frontier town, a small exclave of people surrounded by the tundra. [It was about] what happened when a civilized man, in our
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MGM’s Fargo. case Lester Nygaard, put on his mukluks [snow boots] and went out into the wilderness and what he brought back with him. Then it becomes about thinking through the story and the character implications. In the second year it was about how you turn 1979 into a crime story, and looking at what was going on in the country and how the free-love ’60s became the radical, violent ’70s and all the disenfranchised groups who thought they were going to get a seat at the table. So you have Jean Smart’s character saying, Why can’t a woman be the boss? Bokeem Woodbine’s character saying, Why can’t an African-American man be the boss? A lot of it, for me, is about finding my way to the fundamental underpinnings of the show, and working with the writers. It becomes about, how do we engage the audiences’ imagination? That is not normally a requirement for filmed entertainment, right? It’s more of a passive story-delivery device. I like that sense that it’s about what’s happening between the things you’re seeing, those elements of randomness and truthiness and the human struggle to find meaning in everything, which is a staple of Joel and Ethan’s work as well. That sense of, from A Serious Man, you have to accept the mystery. Sometimes there’s a UFO, and sometimes fish fall from the sky—it’s not to be clever but to push the boundaries and make the audience have to think, what does it all mean? That is our everyday struggle. We look at world events and try to make them mean something. Sometimes random things happen. Ultimately they mean what you want them to mean. So there have to be those elements as well. What’s exciting every year is that it’s not a formula. You think, What’s the story this year? And then, How is that story also Fargo? WS: What kind of creative environment have you found at FX Networks that allows you to tell the stories you want to tell? HAWLEY: They vigorously engage, creatively and intellectually. I think for John Landgraf [CEO of FX Networks] it’s the favorite part of his very
corporate job to think it all through with me. I like having a sounding board. FX has a motto, “Fearless,” which is more than a motto over there. They get excited when you come in and pitch something different than what everyone else is doing. But they’re not interested in gimmicks. It has to be character driven. Everything has to add up. You have to do your homework. I have a huge amount of creative freedom, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to get on the phone sometimes and justify what I want to do. Sometimes it’s not that I want a ten-minute parable sequence, but it is a Coen brothers movie, so, I kind of need one! I’m usually doing my best work if I’m having fun. There’s a certain amount of improv to writing and creating and creative problem solving. It’s a team sport, and you’ve got to rally a lot of people to a unique vision that’s going to be almost impossible to execute. So we’re going over that hill, and we’re going together. There’s a general-leading-anarmy quality to it. If you turn that into a positive experience for people, they work harder and they get more excited than if you force them over the hill at the point of a bayonet. WS: You’re also a published author. How do you manage those two creative processes, of novel writing and television writing? Can you be doing both at the same time? HAWLEY: I can multitask to a point, but a book and a TV show are just different. You’ve got to do them in different rooms at different times. I certainly have had moments when I’m going between two or three writers’ rooms talking about two or three different shows, and that’s doable. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. You have four or five other writers, and their collective brain is working the problem, and you can walk in and say, OK, just talk at me for 20 minutes, let me get into this mind space and then I’ll start to engage. A novel is just all me, and it just requires time. Sometimes working on a novel is really mowing the lawn. Honestly, the hardest part of writing 150 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
[Before the Fall, released this year] was the fact that to write a book you have to read the book, right? So you’ve written 300 pages, now you need to take four days and just read the book. Who has time to sit and read a book for four days? [Laughs] That becomes the challenge of it. You know you do your best work when you give yourself that time. And yet there is this pressure to multitask. But that’s the craft. You spend 10,000 hours building the muscle to do your best work under pressure, so that every time you sit down to write, you have access to that, as opposed to waiting for the muse. WS: I remember enjoying your first show, The Unusuals, and being disappointed when ABC pulled the plug after just one season. With that being early in your television career, what did you learn from that experience, of having this show that you believed in but that for whatever reason didn’t find its legs on the network? HAWLEY: You learn a few things. The first thing is, you’ve got to give it your everything. If you’re trying to do something different, it is going to be a harder road, and that has a lot to do with who your partners are and who your network is and how much they’re interested in making something that you can’t just find on any other network. John Landgraf has said, “I’d rather make something great for some people than something good for everybody.” I share that sensibility. It was a struggle at ABC to execute the show that I saw in my head. You’re always fighting clarity. And there were things I wanted to do on that show. It was called The Unusuals, after all—you would think you’d have certain leeway genre-wise, but there was always a lot of pushback. Broadcast TV is 50 percent things happening and 50 percent people talking about their feelings about the things that are happening. That’s not the kind of writer I want to be. Never having run a show before, it showed me that I could put together an amazing cast, that we could tell some challengingly fun stories and play with tone and the inventiveness of the imagery we used and rally everybody and create that team spirit that I talked about earlier. The other thing it started to teach me, and which my second show, My Generation— which was on the air for two episodes—finished teaching me, was, that’s how it works! You get ten episodes, and then you move on to another story. When I got to Fargo, I had no intimidation. I had written three novels by that point and done some movie work. For 12 to 18 months you give that story your everything, and then you move on to the next story.
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CHARLIE BROOKER By Kristin Brzoznowski
Exploring the darker sides of life and the thorny relationship between society and technology, the anthology series Black Mirror made its debut in the U.K. in 2011 and quickly became a cult hit. After two seasons (and a much-talked-about Christmas special starring Jon Hamm) on Channel 4, the dystopian drama is now returning to screens as a Netflix original. Its creator and writer, Charlie Brooker, discusses the creative process of crafting Black Mirror’s twistedly paranoid tales and working with different directors on each standalone story. WS: After having put a flag in the ground with comedy and satire, what led you to veer a bit darker with Black Mirror? BROOKER: The first sort of dark drama that I did was Dead Set, which is a zombie/ horror series that sounds like a comedy because it’s set in the Big Brother house. I’ve always been a fan of horror movies, science fiction and dark twist-in-the-tale stories. I feel like those actually go hand in hand with comedy. Often when I first think of the Black Mirror ideas they make me laugh. Comic writers generally have an affinity with those kinds of “what-if” stories—stories that explore an idea to its logical conclusion, which is often an absurd one. In that way, it felt like a natural progression to me. WS: A lot of the themes in Black Mirror are rooted in the idea of a highly technological future. Was that the starting point for the series?
BROOKER: After I’d done Dead Set, we were thinking of another project to do that was a drama. I had always been a fan of anthology shows like The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected and Hammer House of Horror. Also, when I was growing up, the BBC used to put on these one-off TV movies that were often very conceptual and quite controversial. I felt like there wasn’t much of that happening anymore. I began thinking about doing a series of what-if stories. I thought about, If you were doing The Twilight Zone today, what would you be talking about? At the time of The Twilight Zone, McCarthyism and the Cold War were foremost worries. Today, technology is the thing that’s swept in and is upending everything—for the better or for the worse. I’m not afraid of technology; I’m a gadget-lover! I’m quite geeky when it comes to technology. I’m also neurotic and a worrier. If you present me with some new gizmo, I naturally think of (either to amuse myself or because I’m worried) ways that it will go terribly wrong. In our episodes, technology is never really the villain. It’s a tool that’s in the
the world. On the other, I suppose that in retrospect the themes are global. WS: How did the deal with Netflix come about for season three? BROOKER: When the original seasons went up on Netflix in the U.S., there was really good word of mouth about it quite quickly. It felt to me that a platform like Netflix, a streaming platform, was the ideal home for an anthology show like Black Mirror. Traditionally, anthology series like Twilight Zone or Tales of the Unexpected would struggle slightly in [linear] broadcast schedules because there’s no cliffhanger at the end of the episode to get everybody back next week. On Netflix the whole thing launches in one go, so it makes it more like a short film festival or a collection of stories. It’s the sort of home that anthology shows have been waiting for. In that respect, Netflix was the perfect partner. WS: How did your experience working with Netflix on season three differ from that of the previous two seasons with Channel 4? BROOKER: In some ways, it didn’t differ at all. I’ve been very fortunate in that we’ve often had a lot of creative freedom. With Netflix,
NETFLIX OUTBID CHANNEL 4 FOR THE RIGHTS TO A THIRD SEASON OF BLACK MIRROR, SHELLING OUT A REPORTED $40 MILLION FOR WORLDWIDE RIGHTS TO THE SHOW. background that our characters are using to wreck their own lives. WS: The first two seasons were a hit with global audiences far outside the U.K. Did you expect the series to resonate so well internationally? BROOKER: Often when you’re making a show you just have your head down and are trying to fight fires and get it made. So it was a really pleasant surprise that it seems to have gone down well globally. The topics we’ve been tackling are global ones. When [Black Mirror] first came along there weren’t many shows dealing with this kind of stuff, so that helped as well. On the one hand, I thought it was a very British show and I certainly didn’t anticipate it catching on around 152 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
though, you don’t have the restrictions of trying to come up with cuts for ad breaks, and you don’t have to deal with all sorts of censorship issues that you might if you were on an overseas commercial broadcaster. You’ve got freedom of duration and don’t have to cut things to a commercial hour. All the notes, observations and feedback from Netflix have been really smart. It’s been a positive experience. They’re encouraging and enthusiastic. It’s not that they applaud absolutely everything we do, but if they have any criticisms they’re always very well considered, thought-out and useful. WS: What are the advantages of working with a different director on each episode in the series?
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Endemol Shine’s Black Mirror.
BROOKER: In many ways, it’s perfect, because you want each story to feel distinct from the others yet have enough in common that it fits under the Black Mirror umbrella without feeling random. The stories are pouring out of my head, and different directors interpret things in different ways. We get them involved in the scripting process and have lots of conversations, and the script may evolve in ways that I hadn’t initially foreseen. We’ll do rewrites and move things around. Sometimes they’ll come in with a really interesting stylistic idea that would not have occurred to me in a million years. What’s great is that it means you’ve got all these individual idiosyncratic interpretations of your source material, which immediately lends a lot of variety. On top of that, there are all sorts of challenges. Everyone has different quirks and different ways of seeing things, and the challenge is that you’re always starting again. You don’t necessarily have that shorthand that would develop if you were making a series in which there was an ongoing story. You’re learning the ropes again each time. WS: Season three has a much larger episode count. Was that something you and Netflix worked out together? BROOKER: We’re doing this season of six and another season of six, which is double what
we did before, when each season had three. They’re also bigger in scope. We arrived at that number together. We didn’t want to suddenly start making ten, because we wanted to make sure that they retained the same quality that we had before. When we were doing three per season, I was also doing all sorts of other series, whereas now I’m focusing most of my time on this. If you’re doing a series that has one overarching story line, you don’t have to recast every time. For us, all the sets have to be rebuilt; we have to create the world each time anew. In that respect, it’s a lot harder. Six felt like a good number to aim for, and thank God we seem to have done it! WS: With a global platform, and a larger budget, did you feel that you had to go bigger with the new episodes or make them more international? BROOKER: It doesn’t feel like we had to; it just sort of followed where the stories went, to be honest. Of course, we did bear in mind that this is going to premiere globally and that probably affects the kind of palette that you’re working on. Diversity was something that I wanted to up in the series generally. Having said that, there are quite a few quirky British things in there because I’m proud of my home country! It’s hopefully British but outward 154 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
looking, which is kind of the opposite of Britain at the moment! [Laughs] There are certainly some stories that are expansive in scope. There are definitely ones that are bigger than what we’ve done before, but we haven’t gone for the spectacle just for the sake of it. There’s probably more variety in tone than we’ve done before. When you’re doing six episodes instead of three, you can say, I want one that’s funnier or I want one that’s incredibly dark, so it balances out overall. WS: What’s your take on the binge-viewing phenomenon? It seems as though getting sucked into a screen and devouring hours of episodes on end the way viewers do with Black Mirror is just the sort of technological dystopia that your show addresses. BROOKER: Endless pleasure! You always want one more. It’s kind of irresistible. People have always sat down in front of the TV for hours, ever since the invention of television. I was recently bingeing [a series] on Netflix, and it does feel very moreish and slightly decadent, but it doesn’t feel like you’re wasting your time. This feels to me just like getting engrossed in a good book. While I can see that to someone peeking in your window, it probably looks disturbing, but what the hell are they doing looking in your window in the first place? [Laughs]
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GARY GLASBERG By Anna Carugati
The CBS show NCIS, which is the most-watched drama in the world and has been the number one drama in the U.S. for five consecutive years, is more than just a procedural. Yes, each week the team, led by Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, played by Mark Harmon, investigates crimes tied to the Navy or Marine Corps. But embedded in the sleuthing and forensics are moments of levity, flashes of humanity and backstories of characters that have become household names: McGee, Abby, Ducky and more. In one of his last interviews, showrunner Gary Glasberg, who passed away suddenly at the end of September, talked about creating new characters for season 14 of NCIS, while also looking after the successful spinoff NCIS: New Orleans. WS: More than once, NCIS has had to deal with major characters leaving the show. What is the mindset in the writers’ room as you decide what kind of character you want to create? GLASBERG: I truly believe that when you have a major character leave a series, as we’ve had with Michael [Weatherly, who played Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo], it’s not about replacing that character, nor is it about replicating that character, it’s about moving forward with the series. The goal was to come up with new characters, something very different, something fresh that brings energy to our team, that gives us the enthusiasm to move forward and continue making this show that we’re excited about and proud of.
WS: How do you balance the ongoing stories of the characters with the procedural structure? GLASBERG: The show has evolved over the years. If you go back and watch the balance of procedural to characters in season one or season two, there was a very different structure than the way we approach the storytelling now. There’s still a case to be solved, there are still procedural elements and the roller-coaster ride of the tension, but the amount of time spent on the procedural cases in many ways has changed, because we want to take the time to spend with our team. Whether it’s a Gibbs personal story, or Fornell or McGee or Abby or Ducky, we want to spend time with them and let our audience continue to get to know them. So very often we’ll do a story that is quite procedurally streamlined and simple in order to have a significant character story, and in another episode, we’ll mix it up and we’ll do a significant crime. We try and balance it and vary it week to week as much as we can. WS: When you joined the series it was already a very valuable franchise. What strengths did you see and how have you built upon them?
writers was, let’s go home with Vance, let’s meet his children, let’s spend more time with Gibbs in the basement, tell me about Ducky’s past. Those are the things that entertain me, and I’m thrilled that viewers have responded in a similar way. WS: What consultants do you have from government agencies to help you keep the procedural parts of the stories realistic? GLASBERG: Part of what makes us a little different from a lot of other shows is that from the beginning, we’ve been very involved in working directly with the Pentagon, the Navy and the Marine Corps, and their liaisons, and with the real NCIS. Whether I’m in communication with the real director of NCIS, Andrew Traver, or talking to the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, we get on the phone and discuss what’s important to them, what they are looking for, how we can benefit from their participation. They chime in on stories. In addition to that, I have specific consultants. A former agent named Leon Carroll, Jr. has been with the mother ship since day one—he’s on set every day. Leon is an invaluable part of our team, and is there to guide us in terms of how real agents would handle a
Currently in its 14th season, Ncis is one of the most-watched shows across the globe and remains the biggest ratings generator on u.s. network tv. GLASBERG: The thing that always struck me about NCIS is the extraordinary balance of humor and pathos and heart and quirkiness and fun, along with solving a crime. In the world of procedural television, very often that’s not the case. [Other procedural shows] are just focused on the police story of it and don’t have the time to have some fun and get to know who the characters are. From day one I recognized—and I credit [NCIS cocreator] Don Bellisario because he always understood this—that even though the early seasons revealed less about the characters, the show has given all of us the opportunity to continue to peel back the layers and understand who we’re dealing with here, and get to know them. Since the day I arrived, the thing that I brought to all the 156 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
situation, and we try to keep things as grounded and accurate as possible. WS: Have you fashioned any characters after real-life agents? GLASBERG: I can’t be specific and tell you this came from one agent or another. But there are absolutely things that come up, [maybe from] a trip to Quantico, NCIS headquarters, where I saw something or I talked to somebody. There are so many little bits and pieces that end up in scripts. With the addition of Wilmer Valderrama, who plays an undercover agent, we’re in the process of talking to a retired deep-cover agent who had 30 years of experience under his belt. To hear those anecdotes and then try to figure out how that fits in with our show, that’s what we love as writers.
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PAOLO SORRENTINO By Anna Carugati intangible entity we call God. And the daily life of a small state comprised mostly of men. Their virtues and aberrations. The weight and responsibility that clergymen must bear in condemning and absolving the sins of others and at the same time their own. These are just some of the themes explored in this long series. WS: As an Oscar-winning filmmaker, what appealed to you about working in television? SORRENTINO: The guarantee of enjoying the same freedom I have enjoyed so far in film. The possibility of challenging myself with very long storytelling, as is only possible with a novel. And inside this long-form story telling having the luxury of what is forbidden in cinema—digression, a digression so broad that it becomes a story in and of itself. These are privileges that only television can offer.
The Italian director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), which examined Italy’s decline. Tackling complex issues is something Sorrentino has done throughout his career, as he has turned his analytical eye to politics, power, aging and physical attraction. He has recently embraced television’s long-form storytelling to scrutinize the Vatican and the Papacy in The Young Pope, a miniseries distributed by FremantleMedia International that stars Jude Law and whose first two episodes premiered at the Venice Film Festival. WS: Where did the idea for a young pope and an American one come from? SORRENTINO: I wanted a pope who didn’t look like any other pope, but at the same time was believable—invented but plausible. So therefore, I focused on a few simple parameters: handsome, young, American and contradictory. WS: What themes and issues did you want to explore in The Young Pope? SORRENTINO: Many, in part due to the fact that along the way the number of episodes of this miniseries became ten. Among the themes I wanted to explore, the most important are the loneliness of power, the peculiarities of life in the Vatican and the power of solitude. Also, the way private dramas interfere in the public role of such an important spiritual guide—the pope. The unique position of being married to the
WS: Did you write the role of Lenny Belardo with Jude Law in mind, or the role of Sister Mary with Diane Keaton in mind? SORRENTINO: No, Jude Law and Diane Keaton were casting ideas that came about after the series was written.
as well. A feature film, a TV series, are the result of a sum of different musicalities that should reveal a final harmony. WS: The Young Pope is produced by a number of partners—Canal+, Sky and HBO. What was it like working with three production partners and what was your working relationship with them? SORRENTINO: For me, it was an idyllic relationship to be able to work with these three production partners, thanks as well to the presence of Lorenzo Mieli and Mario Gianani of Wildside, producers of The Young Pope. Everyone gave me the necessary freedom to set up such a demanding production and their suggestions were always intelligent, discrete and precious. Sky was the first to believe in the project and take part without the slightest hesitation. Canal+ followed immediately with great enthusiasm and HBO surprised us all by embracing the unprecedented role of co-producer in an atypical project conceived of by Italians and made in Italy. WS: The first two episodes of The Young Pope premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The Berlinale had a section dedicated to television. How is television viewed by the film community today?
the young pope, oscar winner paolo sorrentino’s first tv project, has attracted big feature-film names like jude law and diane keaton. WS: You are known for a distinctive cinematic style. How have you adapted your shooting style to television’s small screen? SORRENTINO: I did not change my style. Many feature-film screens are getting smaller and many TV screens are getting bigger and bigger. TV and cinema are starting to converge rather than growing further apart. WS: You have shot in English before. What particular creative challenges does shooting in English present? SORRENTINO: Shooting in English does not present a challenge for me. For me, acting is another declination of musicality, just as camera movements, sets, lighting, editing and costumes are. All of it is music. English possesses this great musicality that I recognize in Italian 158 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
SORRENTINO: I think the film community today is looking with increasing interest at the opportunities that television offers. Filmmakers place at the top of their wish lists the importance of creative freedom and TV networks have learned how stimulating and fruitful granting that freedom can be. For filmmakers, TV has also become a new stimulus and one that is different from the repetitiveness of churning out one film after another. In addition, there is the challenge presented by the length of the storytelling in television, by the physical and psychological stamina of measuring oneself against the longer production and its faster pace. I believe that shooting a TV series makes film directors more skilled and more open even in their own filmmaking.
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SAM VINCENT & JONATHAN BRACKLEY By Anna Carugati came up with, which was to set it in a world that is identical to ours; we call it a parallel present. The show was set [in today’s] world, and the humanoids, the robots, had been invented ten or so years ago. That created a really smart way into the show for the audience. We’ve gone for a broader audience because of that, possibly an audience that wouldn’t have come to a sci-fi show, in addition to sci-fi fans.
Jonathan Brackley
Sam Vincent
Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley have been writing together for much of their professional lives. They joined the British TV series Spooks together and wrote the film adaptation as well. They were then approached to make an Englishlanguage version of the Swedish TV series Äkta människor (Real Humans). They enthusiastically joined the project and crafted Humans for Channel 4 and AMC. The series offers an eerily piercing look at artificial intelligence, centered on Synths, or robotic humanoids, who are used as domestic and workplace servants. The relationship between the Synths and humans is a jumping-off point for exploring the impact of technology on society. WS: When did you first become involved in the project, and what appealed to you about the topic? BRACKLEY: We first came to the project three or four years ago. We had done a lot of work for Kudos, the production company that makes the show here in the U.K. We wrote the last two series of Spooks, their show for the BBC. And we also wrote the Spooks movie for them. Jane Featherstone, the chief of Kudos at the time, came to us and said they had acquired the rights to remake the Swedish show Äkta människor, which was about robots in a contemporary world. She asked if we were interested. We said, absolutely! When we watched the original show, it was so full of fascinating ideas. The central conceit of the show was this clever idea that creator Lars Lundström
WS: How much did you remain faithful to the Swedish version, and what changes did you feel you had to make for your audience? VINCENT: If you watched the first episode of ours and the first episode of the original, you’d see a lot of similarities. Most of the characters have their counterparts, and it’s quite clear who they are. The story begins and moves in the same direction. We loved the original and saw areas we thought we could do more with, and we weren’t so interested in other areas. And the natural effect of that is that as season one goes on, it diverges more and more from the original material as it takes on its own identity. For example, for the character of Niska, who works as a sex worker in a Synth
between us and our devices]. Perhaps the reason we as a culture are so fascinated by that barrier now is that our emotional lives are increasingly entwined with or carried out on our technology, be it social media, public profiles or dating sites. All these things are becoming increasingly intimate, so it makes a lot of sense to do a story about how intimate we are with our technology as it becomes ever more humanlike and ever more able to understand us, even as we, conversely, are less able to understand it. WS: We’ve come a long way from Rosie in The Jetsons, haven’t we? That’s the first thing that came to mind when I watched the first episode of Humans. VINCENT: Yes, we’re a little ways away from that now! But the principles are the same. It is just one of those topics that is endlessly fascinating and never left alone for long by popular culture and popular fiction; particularly at this moment, it is really engaging people. Luckily for us, we’ve come along at the right time. WS: How do you share the writing process?
SEASON ONE OF THE SCI-FI THRILLER HUMANS, WHICH IS BASED ON A SWEDISH HIT, WAS CHANNEL 4’S HIGHEST-RATED DRAMA IN MORE THAN 20 YEARS. brothel, there was a character like her in the original, but she didn’t have the same story. We were interested in actually seeing what it would be like for a conscious Synth to be trapped in that situation. [Our show] branches off [in a new direction], so the second season is almost entirely different in every way from the Swedish original; it just became its own thing. WS: What are some of the themes you wanted to explore? I would imagine one is our dependence on and our ambivalence toward technology. We love it and fear it. VINCENT: You are completely on track. It’s really interesting how we are increasingly reliant on technology for every aspect of our lives, and [how there is a lack of distance 160 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
BRACKLEY: Sam and I worked together on the outline and the arc for the whole season. Then we developed that with our production team here and with our fellow executive producers, and then we brought in other writers. On both seasons we’ve had other writers. Sam and I write the majority of the episodes together. We have had other writers, and they contribute to the character arcs and story lines. Sam and I will always story line our episodes together. Then we will divide up the episode into different parts, go away and write those parts, and then swap and edit each other’s work. We continue that way until the episode is done. WS: And you’ve been writing together for a long time, haven’t you?
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Endemol Shine’s Humans. BRACKLEY: We have. We first wrote something together in 2006, 2007. We worked in comedy when we first started writing. We wrote a lot of comedy sketches for latenight TV shows in the U.K. that no one ever watched! And eventually we wrote a comedy feature film together, which didn’t get made, but still it opened a few doors for us. We got our first prime-time writing credit on a show called Hotel Babylon. We moved on to Spooks after that and carried on from there. WS: The Synths have very specific body and eye movements. Did the actors playing Synths need a bit of training to learn those? BRACKLEY: They did. We knew from the very beginning that we’d have to work out a physical grammar for the way the Synths moved, to distinguish them from humans. So we contacted a dance company here in the U.K. called Frantic Assembly, and one of their choreographers, Dan O’Neill, developed with the actors a way to work out exactly how these machines would move. It’s all largely based on efficiency, because if these Synths did exist, they would use an enormous amount of battery energy and wouldn’t want to waste any of that. So their movements would be very precise, very graceful and they’d always take the shortest route to any action. All our actors were sent to “Synth school” with Dan to learn how to move. They are all experts in that now, and they have all done it again in the second season.
WS: Do you think the world depicted in Humans is not too far away from the one we are living in now? BRACKLEY: What we’ve found, with new stories appearing in the press daily, is that this world is a lot closer than we think. When we were writing the first season, we did a fair amount of research on the topic. For the second season, we were lucky enough to be able to talk to a guy named Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO and co-founder of a Google company called DeepMind. The people at DeepMind are the world’s leading artificial intelligence experts and are at the forefront of this technology. I don’t know if you read about their work with the [Asian] board game Go at the beginning of the year. It’s a notoriously hard board game for humans to play, and no artificial intelligence program had ever been able to beat a human at it, largely because there are so many potential moves in the game that you can’t use brute-force programming to work out every possibility. There is a lot of intuition involved, and it was always a holy grail for artificial intelligence scientists to build something that could beat a human. Finally, at the beginning of the year, Demis’s colleagues at DeepMind did that and beat the world champion several times. It’s fascinating to see what’s possible. WS: Where does season two of Humans pick up, and what did you seek to explore in it? 162 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
BRACKLEY: At the end of the first season, we see our Synth family heading off into the wide world. They are splintered slightly because Niska heads off to do her own thing, and then Vera, Max and Leo go off to find their own way in the world, leaving the Hawkins family back in London. We pick up the show three months after the events of the first season, and the world has moved on a bit. We see that Synths are being integrated deeper into society and penetrating further into our lives. And we pick up with our Synth family—I don’t want to give away too much because there are lots of potential spoilers here! They are out there still fighting, still clandestine, trying to find their place in the world. We will also pick up with the Hawkins family, who are trying to start their lives afresh having been involved in this exciting story with the Synth family. They are finding that it’s hard to move on, bereft as they are without their Synth friends. WS: So the humans appreciate the Synths more, and the Synths are developing feelings. VINCENT: That is very much a part of the show—exploring what it means for the Synths to feel, if they can feel. And more than anything, we’re exploring what it means for us—how we as humans react to seeing Synths develop the ability to think and feel just like we do.
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OLIVER GOLDSTICK By Mansha Daswani
In 1947 in France, as the country worked to recover from the ravages of World War II, fashion houses led by the likes of Christian Dior and Cristóbal Balenciaga were developing styles that would change the way women dressed for generations to come. It is against that backdrop of haute couture that The Collection is set. Co-commissioned by Amazon U.K. and France 3 from Lookout Point, the international co-pro was created and written by Oliver Goldstick, who exec produces the Freeform hit Pretty Little Liars and whose list of writing and producing credits includes Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives. WS: Where did the idea for The Collection come from? GOLDSTICK: When I was working on Ugly Betty, I came [to the U.K.] on holiday during the hiatus period, and my agent at William Morris Endeavor said several people wanted to meet me. I met with Kate Croft, who was then a development executive, and we just hit it off. We started looking for a project to do together and became e-mail friends for about two and a half years. Then [when I returned to the U.K.], Kate handed me the companion book to the very successful exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum called The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–1957. She said, “This is our series.” I said, “No, don’t do this to me!” I’d done two shows that were fashion adjacent, if not set in the fashion world, and it’s a very difficult world to keep afloat. People are dismissive of the fashion world; it’s considered a vain pursuit, and they want to see those who work in it satirized, not truly explored. Kate said
she thought this could be different because of the era and the impact of the time. So I said, “Let me read it.” I went back to the States, and I did a lot of research. I read several books. And I was hooked. There was one in particular, And the Show Went On, by Alan Riding, which was about the arts [in France] during the [Nazi] occupation. I had read the bios of Balenciaga and Dior and I already knew about Chanel. This is a very vital period. People know what the “New Look” is, they know the silhouette, but they don’t recognize what was going on in France. The war was not over for France. There was practically a civil war for two years. Different governments took control every three or four months. It was a very volatile time. And I was fascinated by the idea of reinvention. After the war, there was an influx of immigrants in Paris. So you had this great mix of people, this international community, and a country whose reputation had been tarnished by the war and that needed desperately to be resuscitated. That worked as a metaphor to me. [The characters] could be making wheels, tires, watches, perfumes, it doesn’t matter, the fashion is just the gravy. The couture is visually a feast, but [the focus is on] the desperation and the need to rise from the ashes.
fashion-centric, but I love history, I love novels, I love the idea of being able to tell a story. We don’t have this luxury in America [to be able to] write eight episodes before we start filming. That doesn’t happen. Sometimes we’re lucky to get a second or third one done before the cameras start rolling. But more or less you’re playing catch-up from the time you start production. And you’re robbed of something. You’re robbed of the ability to go back and plant something—a great moment between two characters that can pay off three episodes later. You’re robbed of the ability to have foresight into where this story is going: I know what she does in the last episode—like Hedda Gabler with that gun—so I can sow the seeds in the first and second episodes. We don’t have that luxury in the American system. So this has been refreshing and exciting and compelling. WS: Eight episodes sounds much more manageable than your American shows! GOLDSTICK: That’s the system. I think it’s all changing now. It was dictated by the idea that success was measured by syndication and having to make sure the show sold in multiple markets once you were done producing it, and then the shillings, the shekels, the francs, the cen-
A VETERAN OF U.S. HITS LIKE PRETTY LITTLE LIARS AND UGLY BETTY, GOLDSTICK DELVED DEEP INTO FASHION HISTORY WITH THE AMBITIOUS CO-PRO THE COLLECTION. WS: You’ve spent most of your career in the U.S. system, with shows made for American cable or broadcast networks. What’s this international co-pro been like for you? GOLDSTICK: The thing is, you keep your head down and do your work. I have to be concerned, obviously, that as a writer I have an audience, but I have to be most concerned that I have a product. And that it speaks to me. Thornton Wilder, a great American playwright, when asked, Why did you write this play, he’d say, “Because I wanted to see it tonight. I was in the mood to go to the theater, and I wanted to see a play that I would watch.” His plays weren’t all the same. And you couldn’t predict what a Thornton Wilder play was. I relate to that. I feel like I’ve worked on shows that were 164 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
times, the euros, you name it, rolled in. Now, obviously, the business models have changed, with the different platforms and how people are viewing. Pretty Little Liars, we do 22, 24 episodes; [some viewers will] watch those in a weekend. Those of us who have been writing for this long, we recognize there’s a tectonic shift in how people are receiving programming. People say the landscape is too cluttered, there are too many programs, I don’t know what to watch. And I think, well, yes and no. There aren’t as many movies out as there used to be. And you knew which movies were for you. Television now, we have a menu. The same way Amazon with their books says, if you like this, you might like this, and you might like this. I feel television programming is the same way now.
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SIMON MIRREN By Anna Carugati
Versailles provides a modern twist on period drama and features the splendor and decadence of the court of Louis XIV as he wrestles control of the French government. Co-produced by Canal+, Zodiak Fiction, Capa Drama and Incendo, the series is helmed by executive producers and writers Simon Mirren and David Wolstencroft. Together, they crafted a bold, lavish series that examines the early years of the Sun King’s reign, the opulent palace he built, and the women in his life. It also explores the fascinating relationship and rivalry between Louis and his brother, Philippe, and how together they set new standards for art, fashion, mores and manners. WS: How did you get involved in the project? MIRREN: The first time I heard about it was when Anne Thomopoulos [one of the executive producers of Versailles] called me and said there was a project called Versailles in Paris that she was involved with. It had been in some sort of development for about five years, and she wanted to find someone who could breathe new life into it. She sent me some material, which I read but didn’t respond to very well. I didn’t know anything about that period in French history, and period drama is not something I ever really looked at doing or had any idea about. But I started to do some research about Louis XIV—I asked my mother, who is a teacher, and my aunt Helen [actress Helen Mirren], who has done a lot of period drama, What’s the deal with Louis XIV? I started to read about Louis XIV and saw the relationship between him and his brother, Philippe. I thought it was the most remarkable relationship
of its time, in my interpretation of the period. What was really evident to me was just how extraordinary that relationship was. It gave birth to modern media in its time with regard to music, poetry, dance, fashion, art and even science; Louis was much more prolific than I ever realized. I wondered where he got the idea to build the palace [of Versailles]. When I started reading about how he built the palace, I realized from my years working on Criminal Minds and with the BAU, the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI in Quantico, that there was a very strong psychopathy to Louis similar to what a CEO would have. I wondered why Louis built the palace around his father’s hunting lodge. Why didn’t he just tear it down? To me, that was a psychological trait [that indicates] a kind of psychopathy. I wondered if he built around the envelope to respect his father or to say, Look at what I’ve done, Daddy. Or, did he build Versailles as a kind of, “Fuck you, Father?” [Maybe he wanted to say,] “I’m not just a number, I’m Louis XIV. I’m going to make France more than it ever was before I got here, and it’s going to be completely different after I leave.” By building Versailles, he built a precinct, and precinct drama is something I’ve always worked in. Here’s an extraordinary precinct [in which
at Cambridge studying Louis XIV.” David had worked with all the experts and had a photographic memory for all this history. WS: How did you take facts and build on them with your storytelling? MIRREN: Louis XIV woke up to 100 people every day. We can’t present that real history, so we had to choose a few particular characters [to] represent 100 characters. We didn’t have the time, and we certainly didn’t have the money, to dress the 100 people that Louis wakes up to! We also had to interweave characters that were fictitious, so we had some way of explaining other things. We also had to take a piece of history and condense it down to a couple of years. A lot of the facts [we showed] are real; they just happened over a much more extended period of time. We wanted to take the facts and present them in a way that was modern. WS: With all your years of experience working in American writers’ rooms, how was this process different? MIRREN: The word “showrunner” should only be used in America. Writers in the U.S. fought very hard to claim that title through the WGA
SAID TO BE THE MOST EXPENSIVE FRENCH SERIES EVER MADE, VERSAILLES WAS GIVEN THE GREENLIGHT FOR A SECOND SEASON BY CANAL+ BEFORE A SINGLE EPISODE HAD AIRED. Louis] gave birth to modern media, with the help of his brother, who was gallivanting around Paris, gathering up all his very artistic friends. His brother was bringing all these extraordinary people to Versailles, and they would become Louis’s friends. He would make them official court people for the art world. And the stories that evolve from that precinct are endless. Then I had a dream about the Hall of Mirrors, so I wrote what became the opening to Versailles, which is the girl running through the Hall of Mirrors. I got to about page 20 and I thought, well, that’s it! David called me up, and I said, “I’ve been offered a period drama. It’s Versailles. After page 20 I’m a bit lost, so I’m going to have to bury myself in books.” And he said, “You won’t have to because I got a star first [honors degree] 166 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
[Writers Guild of America]. A showrunner has to sign a massive document and promise to deliver a complete show to the network for X amount of dollars, and the showrunner will oversee absolutely everything. That kind of power doesn’t exist in Europe right now; there are levels of it, but it’s not the same experience. There is no real writers’ room, per se, in the way there are writers’ rooms in America. It’s not the same because the mechanics of how America has built the system of television is very, very different from how it’s been built in Europe. In Europe it was so steeped in theater, but in America it was free of all that in a way. I’m not saying that [in the U.S.] we’re any better at [making shows] than in Europe—it’s just a different way of doing it.
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ony is one of the most recognized brands in the world. Across decades, millions of consumers around the globe have associated Sony with highquality TV sets, the Walkman, top-of-the-line cameras for professionals and amateurs, among many other products, and, of course, the PlayStation, which has provided video-gamers with countless hours of fun. Sony also manufactures the digital image sensors used in smartphones, and the sharpness of those sensors has helped fuel the selfie revolution. Sony Corporation’s success has always centered on the nexus of technology and content. Under the leadership of its president and CEO, Kazuo Hirai, the company has been realigning its businesses. Today the businesses are organized under three pillars: Electronics, Entertainment and Financial Services. In the financial results for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2016, the total electronics business reported operating profit for the first time in five years, and net profit was positive for the first time in three years. Sony Corporation’s sales and operating revenues for the year amounted to ¥8.1 trillion ($71.7 billion). The Entertainment division includes Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and Sony Music Entertainment. SPE is home to motion-picture production, acquisition and distribution under labels such as Columbia Pictures, TriStar Pictures and Screen Gems. Upcoming releases include Passengers, Inferno and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Sony Pictures Television (SPT) produces and distributes a wide variety of shows across
all platforms, including critically acclaimed dramas like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, House of Cards and The Blacklist; comedies like The Goldbergs and Kevin Can Wait; unscripted shows such as Shark Tank and daily dramas like The Young and the Restless. SPT has also formed or invested in international networks, with some 150 channel feeds in 178 countries, which include the brands AXN, Sony Channel and Animax. Most of these channels make an abundance of local productions. SPT also operates Crackle, an online service that offers TV shows and movies from the studio as well as original series such as The Art of More and StartUp. In addition, Sony operates buoyant video-game and apps businesses. Fully aware that younger consumers are canceling pay-TV subscriptions, or never getting them to begin with, Sony has leveraged the huge popularity of the PlayStation by offering PlayStation Vue, a TV service that streams live TV, movies and sports on a variety of devices. Hirai tells World Screen he is confident in Sony’s prospects for growth. The company continues to invest in innovation, develop new products, cut costs without compromising quality, and renew its focus on sales and marketing. And there are endless possibilities to distribute movies, television shows and digital content across a constantly growing number of platforms and devices, as Sony remains committed to the sweet spot where technology and content come together to provide consumers with enjoyable experiences in the home, in the theater or on the go.
KAZUO HIRAI SONY CORPORATION
By Anna Carugati
WS: Over the last few years, Sony has been restructured through the establishment of independent business units. What has been the strategy behind the restructuring? HIRAI: Establishing independent business units is meant to increase transparency, promote accountability, place an emphasis on sustainable profits and accelerate the decision-making process. Some businesses within Sony Group, such as the motion pictures, music, game and mobile businesses, have been operating as separate entities for some time, while other business units, mainly in the electronics businesses, were operated as divisions of Sony Corporation headquarters. We started to split out these electronics businesses in July 2014, starting with televisions. This was one of several factors that I credit with returning Sony’s televisionmanufacturing business to profit in the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2015, which I am very proud of. Importantly, this effort to create independent business units also includes a system for closer cooperation between group companies, which we call One Sony. WS: GE sold off NBCUniversal and is now a manufacturing company. Time Warner shed Time Warner Cable and other assets and is now a pure content company. Sony remains a hybrid. Why is it beneficial to have the three units— Electronics, Entertainment and Financial Services? What synergies do the three divisions have that allow Sony to operate as a single unit? 10/16 WORLD SCREEN 187
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HIRAI: Electronics, Entertainment and Financial Services are the three pillars of Sony’s business, and we will continue to grow all three. With a range of businesses in our portfolio, what’s most important is to make sure we have a robust business model for each. That will give Sony Group a further reinforced revenue base, as well as a volatilitytolerant enterprise structure. With the rapid advancement of technologies, Electronics and Entertainment are getting closer than ever—and so are Electronics and Financial Services. I see some great opportunities to create new innovations between them, and drive future growth for Sony. WS: What are the benefits of keeping Sony Pictures Entertainment as part of the company, and why would it be detrimental to spin it off? HIRAI: The studio is an important driver of future growth for Sony, and it has for years been the cornerstone of Sony’s value-chain strategy. Sony’s electronics divisions have collaborated with Sony Pictures to roll out new cinema cameras, new digital-projection systems, and new home-entertainment technologies, with great benefits to each. Sony’s co-founder Akio Morita famously said that hardware and software go together like the wheels of a car. It’s hard to put a dollar figure
the latest technologies into each version of PlayStation.
The Shark Tank format has been adapted in a slew of markets, including in Mexico on Canal Sony. on that kind of synergy, but it’s a huge part of who we are at Sony. It’s also worth noting that each time one of our films, TV shows or television networks is watched or streamed, the audience is reminded that Sony is intimately involved in creating the very best entertainment experiences at every step of the way—from lens to theater to living room to mobile device. The current environment creates the optimal circumstances for technology and content to truly come together in the minds—and living rooms—of consumers. By being on
Virtual reality is a key growth opportunity for Sony, which has just released the PlayStation VR system.
multiple sides of that equation, and by having multiple relationships with the consumer, Sony has a major competitive advantage. WS: The gaming division drove much of the recently posted profits. Tell us about the genesis of the division, which you spearheaded in the ’90s. What was your vision for the gaming business, and how has it developed? HIRAI: The PlayStation business started as a joint venture between Sony Corporation and Sony Music Entertainment. What was then called Sony Computer Entertainment (now known as Sony Interactive Entertainment) was established in 1993, just one year before the original PlayStation game console was introduced in Japan. The combination of a hardware company with expertise in technology and a software company with deep knowledge in entertainment and software was really key to the success of PlayStation. Compared to traditional players in the game industry, we had a unique and better business model, more support from content creators—including third-party game developers—and therefore a platform that had the greatest games with the greatest variety. In the years between the original PlayStation and the PlayStation 4, Sony has always been at the forefront of digital entertainment for gaming fans worldwide, consistently building
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WS: Tell us about the PlayStation Network and PlayStation Vue. In an age of increasing numbers of cord-cutters and cord-nevers, what options do they offer consumers? Why is it important for Sony to develop these offerings? HIRAI: PlayStation Vue offers consumers an intuitive, immediate, dynamic and personalized TVviewing experience. It’s a cloudbased TV service, now available across the entire United States, with more than 100 top live sports, movie and TV channels, and a lot of other unique features. For instance, with a cloud DVR, users can record hundreds of shows at once. Thousands of hours of content can be stored on PlayStation Vue’s cloud DVR, which is ten times more storage than any DVR on the market. With a single PlayStation Vue subscription, users can stream content simultaneously across different devices, and the interface seamlessly blends live and on-demand content and puts top programming front and center. It also has powerful search and discovery tools, as well as the ability to “catch up” on popular programming in the three days after a show’s first live airing. From Sony’s standpoint, by offering a TV-viewing experience in addition to gaming, we can make PlayStation even more attractive, and we can expand the customer base from hard-core gamers to a broader audience. WS: As more and more consumers opt to watch content on portable devices and small screens, how do you see the future of big screens— movie theaters, home entertainment and wide-screen TVs? Do you think content will continue to be viewed on large screens? HIRAI: Consumers want to be able to watch content across all screens, and they want the experience to be seamless. At Sony, we are dedicated to creating the best possible experience for our audiences, no matter where they wish to watch, but I do think there will always be a special place for the theatrical
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Sony Pictures Television produces for a diverse range of outlets, with a current slate that includes the Starz hit Outlander and AMC’s buzzy graphic novel–based series Preacher. experience, and also one for the big screen at home. Watching on a small mobile screen is great and certainly convenient for many situations, but it can never match the fun and camaraderie of watching a sporting event with friends in your living room, or movie night with the family, or taking your partner to the theater. WS: Some studios are focusing much of their output on movies with more special effects and action and less dialogue to entice viewers outside English-language territories, particularly in China and Russia. Is Sony Pictures Entertainment also following this trend? HIRAI: I think SPE’s motion-picture group is doing an excellent job at building the studio’s new film slate with a focus on properties that have global appeal. From Spider-Man to Passengers to Inferno, these films have strong potential in every corner of the world. At the same time, if you look at a lot of countries, many of the top films in any given year are not Hollywood imports but local content, so SPE has also ramped up locallanguage productions around the world. From China to Russia to Latin America, Sony Pictures is working with the best filmmakers in each market to create local stories that are locally appealing. This year alone, we have released local-language films in more than ten countries. WS: Do you plan on keeping the label structure at SPE: TriStar,
Columbia, Sony Pictures Classics, Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Animation? What type of products will they be producing? HIRAI: Columbia releases major franchise movies like Spider-Man and Passengers. TriStar has a literary focus and is more filmmakerdriven, with movies like Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting 2. Screen Gems is one of the best horror and comedy genre labels in the business, with huge hits like Resident Evil, or Biohazard as it’s known in Japan. Sony Classics is a U.S. label that distributes art-house films like documentaries and foreign-language [titles]. The label strategy works because each group has its own expertise and focus. WS: What challenges and opportunities for the entertainment and gaming industries do you see in the Chinese market? HIRAI: China is an enormous opportunity for the entertainment industry and Sony in particular. Not only are we working on getting more of our Hollywood films into the Chinese market, but we are working with local partners in both film and TV to make Chinese content as well. For example, we produce a very successful Mandarin-language adaptation of the U.S. series Mad About You. Beyond film and television, there are amusement parks and branded consumer products, as well as a huge enthusiasm for VR. I’ve read some estimates that the market for VR in China alone is
expected to grow to over $8.5 billion in the next four years. WS: Much of SPE’s television output has been critically acclaimed and the offerings are diverse, ranging from dramas and comedies to reality and game shows to soap operas. What has been driving the division’s success? HIRAI: I attribute their success to several things, among them their relationships with talent and their innovative business approach in an evolving marketplace. On the business side, their flexibility to create new models where all parties benefit has allowed them to be early movers on new opportunities. With regard to talent, they have made a name for themselves in the creative community for being very supportive of both the process and the success of their shows. Being an independent studio provides some significant advantages for talent, not the least of which is [the ability] to develop projects for multiple networks and platforms, and our team has a wonderful track record of keeping those shows in production. As a result, they have a roster of impressive talent, several of whom have created multiple hits for the studio. WS: SPE does not own a broadcast network in the U.S. As broadcast and cable networks in the U.S. increasingly take shows from their sister studios, do you see this as a problem down the road? Will this limit SPE’s ability to get shows on the air?
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HIRAI: In the U.S., we do operate some great networks: GSN, getTV, Sony Movie Channel, Cine Sony and our streaming digital network, Crackle. Each of these networks caters to specific audiences. Being independent from a major broadcast network, our TV production group can take their work to any network on any platform and find the place where it has the best chance to succeed. Looking back, I think it has helped shape an organization that is more creative, nimble and hardworking, because they have to make content that they’re confident will find a buyer and work more closely with their distribution colleagues. It has also made SPT pioneers in new media, and now our TV group is a top producer for streaming networks. WS: SPE’s Indian channel business marked its 20th anniversary last year. What’s driving the continued success of the Sony portfolio in India? Are you eyeing further expansion into the regional channels space in this territory? HIRAI: Within our TV network business, properties like Sony Channel, AXN and Animax operate around the world, but India is one of our most important markets. We were both wise and lucky to get into the Indian TV business when we did. Our networks have grown tremendously over the past 20 years, both organically and through acquisitions and investment, and the demographic
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found that over half of the show’s viewers were new to the service, proving that strong original content is key to drawing audiences to OTT networks.
Paprika is among the properties airing on Animax, an anime and entertainment channel available in Japan and a number of other markets. trends in India con tinue to be very favorable. Our success in the market has been driven by strong local and original content, including sports, movies and TV shows, and we will certainly continue to invest significantly in our Indian TV business. Over the last year, we have expanded our bouquet of channels and added new brands. We also continue to increase our investments in digital and on-demand offerings, and we have expanded into new sports like NBA basketball, soccer and wrestling, which are fast gaining popularity alongside cricket, with which we have seen so much success over the years. WS: In what other geographic areas do you see the most potential for growth in the channel business? HIRAI: Latin America and Asia continue to be very strong growth markets, and we are expanding both our digital and linear channels there, as well as in Europe. This summer, we reached an agreement to substantially expand our Indian business through the acquisition of TEN Sports. India has been a significant driver of growth for many years, and sports has played a vital role in our success there. In Latin America, we’ve seen a lot of success with original programming like Shark Tank México, which is produced by SPT and based on an original Japanese format. In Asia, our Animax brand is particularly strong. It’s the number one pay-TV channel in Japan and is now available in dozens of
countries worldwide. Animax recently launched a new streaming service on PlayStation in Japan and has also expanded into concerts. Thousands of fans attend Animax Musix events throughout Asia. We also recently launched two new pan-Asian networks. GEM, with our longtime partner Nippon TV, broadcasts Japanese shows and music programs, leveraging many of the hits made by our own Sony Music Japan. ONE, in partnership with Seoul Broadcasting System, is more focused on popular Korean entertainment. Our channels business also continues to grow in Europe. We recently acquired a bouquet of channels in Turkey—a new growth market for us—and our acquisition of a channel group in the U.K. has proven very successful. Sony now has several of the most popular kids’ channels in the U.K., and we are looking at options to grow that business in other markets. WS: SPE owns a stake in HOOQ in Asia and has been expanding the reach of Crackle. How do you see Sony’s OTT business, and what opportunities are there for expansion? Are there opportunities to increase awareness of these platforms via synergies with your smart-TV and mobile businesses? HIRAI: With a vast install base, PlayStation is a powerful gateway to the living room and a tremendous asset for every part of Sony. It streams not only games but our networks like Crackle, Animax and
AXN, and it showcases our movies and music as well. Also, Sony Pictures and Sony Mobile have a very collaborative relationship. In the last year, they worked together on a number of promotions, including digital movies bundled with VR apps. Crackle has been available on PlayStation for years and has steadily expanded both the markets it serves and the content it provides. It’s now available in 21 countries on every screen, including BRAVIA TV and PlayStation, of course. By investing more in original content, Crackle has attracted a large number of new viewers. With The Art of More, for example, we
WS: Tell us about the investments Sony is making in virtual reality. HIRAI: With PlayStation VR (PS VR), a virtual reality system for PS4, set to go on sale in October of this year, the first order of business right now for VR is to make sure that we have a successful launch of this system. We are exploring how to develop VR as an entirely new creative and business opportunity across Sony. The content will predominantly be games during the initial stage, but we continue to have many discussions internally about other applications for VR. Together with Sony Interactive Entertainment, we are looking at the entire value chain of what VR means to Sony. Once we have a successful launch of PS VR, what’s going to follow is a series of nongame content that can be produced by Sony Pictures, Sony Music and also Sony Music Japan. This will be followed by a number of value-chain products that actually create VR images, from capturing to editing to delivery.
SAB TV, home to Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah, is part of Sony’s Indian channel bouquet.
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ON THE RECORD
he mission of the Disney|ABC Television Group is to tell engaging stories, whether in live-action or animated TV series, movies or news programs, that people around the world can enjoy on whatever screen they want. As part of The Walt Disney Company, Disney|ABC shares its parent’s commitment to marrying storytelling and innovation. Ben Sherwood has been involved in the creation of news, nonfiction and fiction stories his entire career, which he started as a journalist. He joined ABC News in 1989 and then spent several years at NBC News before returning to ABC. He was appointed president of ABC News in 2010. In 2014, it was announced that he would be succeeding Anne Sweeney as co-chair of Disney Media Networks (the other co-chair is John Skipper, the president of ESPN) and president of Disney|ABC Television Group. As such, Sherwood is responsible for ABC Studios, the ABC Owned Television Stations Group, the ABC Television Network, Disney Channels Worldwide, the U.S. cable network Freeform (formerly ABC Family), Disney|ABC Home Entertainment and Television Distribution and Disney Media Distribution (DMD), as well as Disney’s equity interests in A+E Networks and Hulu. Sherwood has already made his mark on ABC Entertainment by appointing Channing Dungey as its president and Patrick Moran as president of ABC Studios. The studio produces primarily for the ABC network with shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, Quantico and Black-ish, but also for other networks, with Criminal Minds, Criminal Minds:
Beyond Borders and Code Black for CBS; and through a partnership with Marvel, Daredevil and Jessica Jones for Netflix. DMD sells many of these shows and scores of others, including programming from ABC News, children’s fare and specials like the annual Academy Awards show. Disney Channels Worldwide, which includes the Disney Channel, Disney XD, Disney Junior, Disney Cinemagic, Hungama and Radio Disney brands, has been thrilling children around the globe with shows like Austin & Ally, Jessie, Mickey Mouse Clubhouseand Girl Meets World, movie franchises like Descendants, and series starring the Disney Princesses, the most recent of which is Elena of Avalor. Disney Channels Worldwide has also been a leader in experimenting with innovative ways of scheduling shows, often offering episodes online or on apps before their premiere on linear channels. And Disney|ABC, a pioneer in providing TV episodes for sale on iTunes more than ten years ago, and then streaming full episodes on its websites, has since launched a series of successful WATCH apps. Sherwood has firsthand experience in the craft of storytelling as a published author of essays, a nonfiction book and two novels, one of which was adapted into the feature film Charlie St. Cloud. He oversees teams around the world that are constantly looking for talent and ideas that can travel. He talks to World Screen about the importance of international markets and of making entertainment and news content available on all platforms.
BEN SHERWOOD
DISNEY MEDIA NETWORKS AND DISNEY|ABC TELEVISION GROUP
By Anna Carugati
WS: What considerations went into putting together the fall schedule, and what is your vision for prime-time entertainment on ABC? SHERWOOD: Our vision, shared by Channing Dungey [the president of ABC Entertainment], is to make popular, high-quality entertainment that reaches both women and men and can travel around the world.You will see an even sharper focus on big bets, big stars and big writers and producers, as well as a renewed focus on what the ABC brand means for audiences in the U.S. WS: What is your strategy for ABC Studios? SHERWOOD: ABC Studios, with Patrick Moran at the helm, is one of our secret weapons for winning the future of television. The studio has a terrific track record of developing and building hits that are popular not just in the U.S. but across the globe. Our aim is to produce even more high-quality emotional entertainment, primarily for ABC and also for other outlets that make sense, like streaming services or other networks. WS: How does DMD work with the studio and the network during the greenlighting process of shows? SHERWOOD: We are very aware of the critical role of the international audience in the global success of our shows. We think carefully about how a show will travel around the world. DMD works very closely with the network and with our ABC Studios and Freeform executives and all producers in the Disney television family throughout the development process, and offers input 10/16 WORLD SCREEN 343
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Shondaland’s Scandal is one of ABC’s highest-rated dramas and its most tweet-worthy, with viewers frequently tuning in live so they can enjoy jaw-dropping story lines spoiler-free. from all corners of the world about market intelligence along with relevant feedback from our biggest buyers. Our goal is to share active, broad, ongoing feedback on the competitive international TV and media landscape as we develop future programs. One of our priorities has been to think about the entire lifecycle of a show, from its inception here in the U.S. all the way to its airing from Laos to Liechtenstein and every place in between. It’s been my privilege, over the last two years in my new role, to travel to Europe and Asia, and early next year I’ll be going to Latin America. I feel very fortunate to work with leaders like Diego Lerner who leads Europe [plus the Middle East and Africa], Paul Candland in Asia, Claudio Chiaromonte in Latin America, Marina Jigalova-Ozkan in Russia and Stanley Cheung in China. We have great teams driving our businesses around the world. My travel partner in many of these adventures, from the Tokyo fish market to the cobblestone streets of London to the beer halls of Germany, has been Ben Pyne [the president of global distribution at Disney Media Networks]. He is unsurpassed in his mastery of international distribution and spearheads the Disney|ABC Television Group’s
international efforts. I’m new to this role, but I am lucky to work with the best in the business as we try to sell our content around the world. WS: How important is international program development becoming? SHERWOOD: International is critically important to our long-term success. And we all see that while many people talk about building walls and drawing borders, we think it’s more important than ever for our shows to travel freely everywhere and find audiences everywhere. So we are extremely engaged in working with our colleagues around the world to find compelling stories developed locally, in local languages, with local talent. Our Latin American team has been at the forefront of producing very successful local versions of our U.S. series for more than a decade. In recent years, they have branched out and are developing original series like Hasta que te Conocí, based on the life of Mexican singer Juan Gabriel, may he rest in peace, which aired on September 11 on Telemundo in the U.S. and has also aired on TV Azteca in Mexico. We’ve also got the upcoming original biopic El César, based on the life of professional
boxer Julio César Chávez, which started production in September. We’re seeing growth in local adaptations of our series and formats in a number of territories, especially in Asia, with local versions in development of Criminal Minds in Korea and Revenge in China. On the unscripted side, The Amazing Race is going strong with over a dozen local versions around the world. One more thing to note—in her new role as managing director of international content and talent, Keli Lee is working closely with local DMD teams to identify local talent on and off screen and nurture new partner opportunities to develop local content and feed into the U.S. pipeline. Keli was vital in finding and bringing us the amazing Priyanka Chopra, the star of Quantico. Keli is based in London and is traveling the world looking for great talent, great formats and great producers. WS: How is Disney|ABC offering programming on multiple platforms? SHERWOOD: We want to be everywhere on every platform. Across our five networks, our streaming apps have been downloaded more than 50 million times over 40 different devices. And on average, our viewers are watching
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approximately 30 million hours of content a month. That’s a critical part of our core business, and we want to take these initiatives to the next level. We’re always reviewing our programming strategies across all platforms. WS: What are you learning about what viewers are watching on linear networks, online or on apps? SHERWOOD: Most of our viewers are truly multiplatform. While they still prefer to watch traditional live television on a TV set, they want to have the ability to enjoy our content on their own schedules, on their DVR or on-demand, as well as on our live linear schedule. We know that they want television in their homes, at work, at the beach and in their pocket. They want our content all the time, everywhere, so we’re making it available to them. Not surprisingly, the audience for our digital platforms skews a bit younger than linear, but in terms of what people are watching, digital viewership mirrors linear—what’s popular on the air tends to be most popular as well on digital. As for viewing trends, unlike the U.S., where pay TV is so widely adopted, international penetration varies greatly and, as a result, we see quite a bit of variation
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in content viewership across regions and countries. As VOD growth is happening all over the world, the adoption rate of these services varies based on content offerings and technology enablement. In some territories, we see tremendous opportunity in mobile video given the focus on personal entertainment. At the end of the day, we know that across the world time-shifting and play-shifting, in terms of video consumption, are definitely growing, but we also believe that the traditional broadcast business in most territories remains strong. As a result of all the new ways consumers are able to view content, we are encouraged to see that overall consumption of video on all platforms is on the rise. WS: What is Disney|ABC’s relationship with Netflix and other OTT providers? What considerations go into determining how to package programming and channels for OTT services? SHERWOOD: We have a long, productive and profitable relationship with Netflix and with other OTT providers. We always seek to maximize the value of our content when we take it out to the market.
We have a diverse set of partners in this licensing area, from traditional cable and satellite to SVOD platforms to a variety of over-the-top offerings, all the way to Apple’s iTunes and Google Play. These partners have great interest in content from across the Disney|ABC Television Group, and we are constantly evaluating how to sell this content, window to window, in order to maximize the overall value of the entire television ecosystem. We also are very mindful of making deals that give us the ability to be flexible, to change with consumer behavior and with shifts in the overall television ecosystem. We don’t make long-term deals. We like to keep our options open because we know that change is happening at a faster and faster rate. We also know that the world is not a monolithic television market. We recognize that every platform is different territory by territory; what works in the U.K. may be very different from what works in Brazil. In each case, we look closely at market dynamics, as well as the uniqueness of each country and each audience, to determine the best plan for our content and the related windowing strategy.
ABC Studios is producing Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders for CBS’s mid-season schedule. WS: When viewers have so many options for how to enjoy programming, what is the role of a broadcast network? SHERWOOD: We love broadcast television. It’s a great business in the U.S. and in many countries and territories around the world. In the U.S., ABC is traditionally the first window for our programming, and it often drives great success, buzz
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and enthusiasm. Broadcast is still by far the best and most efficient way to reach the biggest audiences simultaneously. For instance, the Oscars this year on ABC reached more than 69 million people during the telecast, and let’s not forget it’s often the programming that premieres on broadcast that drives a lot of usage on all of the other platforms. WS: Tell us about the rebrand of ABC Family as Freeform. What type of programming is Freeform offering, and how is it meeting the challenge of reaching millennials? SHERWOOD: We’re very encouraged by the changes that have been made at Freeform. We changed the name to signal more clearly to our existing audience, and to new potential viewers, what the service stands for. We believe that the best audience for Freeform is young adults between their first kiss and their first kid, as Tom Ascheim, the president of Freeform, likes to say. Those consumers are typically neither children nor parents, and thus our old brand name, ABC Family, didn’t speak clearly to their lives or their interests. We believe that Freeform works better as a name and a brand and a message, speaking to the central journey of this audience, the everlengthening transition between childhood and adulthood. The
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SHERWOOD: Absolutely, we are always on the hunt for great talent, and Maker is most definitely on our radar. Disney XD recently partnered with Maker to identify and develop YouTube creators who could contribute original shortform programming to Disney XD’s digital platforms.
Disney Channel’s latest hit, Elena of Avalor, features the company’s first Latina princess. early results [of the rebrand] are quite encouraging. Our most recent research suggests that the audience is giving a much more favorable response in terms of attributes of the brand, like “fresh,” “bold,” “innovative,” “modern,” “cool” and “made for me.” Shadowhunters was the first show to launch after the rebrand, and it was our second-highestrated premiere ever and one of the top-rated shows. We are very encouraged by this, but we know we also have a lot of work to do to capture this growing and important audience. We also know that these young audiences are consuming content in all kinds of different ways, so Freeform is making a big commitment to showcasing content in all the ways that young viewers want to consume it. All our new shows will be available not only on TV but also stacked and binge-watchable in the Freeform app. I think you’re going to see that Freeform will lead the way for us in truly serving the multiplatform young viewer.
WS: Disney has doubled its investment in VICE Media to some $400 million. Do you foresee Disney| ABC outlets working with VICE on programming? SHERWOOD: I could absolutely see Disney|ABC working with VICE on the right project. VICE is a big part of our A+E Networks portfolio with the new cable channel VICELAND, which is just getting started. ESPN recently announced that VICE is going to be producing new, original sports series that will air exclusively on ESPN’s TV, digital and mobile outlets, while select documentaries from ESPN Films’ 30 for 30 will also air on VICELAND. We are open to great ideas, and we’ve got good relationships with VICE. We’re excited about what they are doing and what we could do together. We don’t have anything in the works yet, but it’s definitely in the realm of the possible. WS: Are you also looking at some of the talent from Maker Studios who can cross over into longform storytelling for any of the Disney|ABC outlets?
WS: Because viewers are watching programming in so many different ways, are the various Disney|ABC assets experimenting with new ways of premiering or offering new episodes of series? SHERWOOD: We are always looking for the most creative ways to premiere new episodes, to bring in viewers and to engage and excite our fans. Disney Channels regularly make their biggest programming events available on all digital platforms before they air on the linear channel; they consistently drive ratings with this strategy. This past July, we previewed the highly anticipated new series Elena of Avalor on our Disney Channel and Disney Junior apps. Going back as far as 2013, Disney Channel put nine episodes of Sheriff Callie’s Wild West on the network app. It generated 23 million views, and the show was still number one in the ratings with its linear premiere. More recently, we aired Disney Channel’s Adventures in Babysitting [on the Disney Channel app] a week before its linear premiere, which then went on to become the number one cable TV telecast among kids and tweens and cable’s number one movie in total viewers in 2016. We’ve done the same thing at Freeform, where we premiered their summer series online this year to generate buzz for the linear airing. WS: You mentioned Elena of Avalor; tell us more about its international rollout. SHERWOOD: We are incredibly excited and proud of Princess Elena, Disney’s first Latina princess. We have a very strong belief in Elena’s potential, and she will launch broadly and in the same time frame in 163 countries in 34 languages around the world.
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The program has been very well received in the U.S., becoming America’s number one program among all kid-targeted TV networks in total viewers, kids 2 to 11 and also adults 18 to 49. In all the telecasts to date, Elena of Avalor has reached more than 37 million total viewers and has also driven a lot of engagement—more than 13 million viewers on our Disney Channel and Disney Junior apps. The majority of the other Disney Channels around the world are going to launch Elena in October and November, the key rating period in many countries. We believe most will follow our strategy of presenting it in two consecutive episodes to introduce the character and engage viewers in her story. WS: What growth opportunities do you see for Disney’s international channel business? SHERWOOD: Now that Disney Channel has more than 116 channels available in over 503 million homes around the world, we believe it is very well positioned for growth on new platforms and in new content formats. We’ve seen encouraging momentum as we create new offerings on mobile platforms, especially in Asia. As these new platforms emerge, we also want to find formats and short-form content that will fit even better with mobile-first offerings. We’re also focusing on the strategic development of local content like Violetta and Soy Luna that originated in Latin America but have been broadcast around the world. We’re also looking at more local productions like Evermoor and The Lodge from Europe. We continue to believe that the right mix of local and global content makes our Disney Channel business successful around the world. We see Southeast Asia and Africa as very interesting opportunities for our Disney Channels Worldwide business, as we hope to build on the relationships we already have with Astro [in Malaysia], MNC TV [in Indonesia] and MultiChoice [in Africa].
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IN CONVERSATION
ears from now, when scholars look back at the history of television, they will undoubtedly cite The Wire and The Sopranos as two of the principal shows that ushered in the golden age of television. Both shows aired on HBO, the premium pay service that has since been continuously pushing the boundaries and raising the bar of scripted fare. Game of Thrones has made television cinematic and has become a must-watch sensation around the world. True Detective, along with such HBO miniseries and movies as Olive Kitteridgeand All the Way, drew established A-list feature-film and television talent—in front of and behind the camera—to the small screen. Girls, Veep and Silicon Valley have brought a new approach to television comedy. HBO’s pursuit of quality and singular voices has paid off in critical acclaim—at this year’s Primetime Emmys, it nabbed six wins, including best drama for Game of Thrones and best comedy for Veep—buzz-worthiness and subscribers. More than that, it has raised the expectations of what a scripted show should be like: highly stylized, ambitious in concept, expertly written and exquisitely performed—in short, auteur television. Under the leadership of its chairman and CEO, Richard Plepler, HBO has broadened the scope of its programming. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Any Given Wednesday with Bill Simmons have been added in late-night slots. Sesame Street joined the roster of children’s and family programming. An already
rich offering of documentaries earned even greater acclaim with The Jinx. And a partnership with VICE Media has given way to a weekly news show and a daily newscast targeted to millennials. Keeping an eye on changing trends in consumer behavior has been a top priority for Plepler. In addition to the linear channel, the multiplex channels and on-demand offerings, there is the authenticated service, HBO GO. And HBO NOW, a stand-alone streaming service, was introduced last year to attract consumers who don’t have a pay-TV subscription but do have a broadband connection. HBO’s businesses stretch far beyond U.S. borders, with feeds in Europe, Latin America and Asia, in addition to international productions and program sales. There is no question that since The Sopranos, many other outlets have been producing high-end, award-winning programming. Despite the growing number of shows across linear and nonlinear platforms, Plepler believes that HBO’s main competitor is viewers’ time. But as long as HBO remains fully focused on doing what it does best, and doing it better than everyone else, Plepler is sure HBO will continue to turn its subscribers into addicts—viewers who become such passionate fans of a show that they can’t live without it. Plepler talks to World Screen about the many ways HBO programming reaches its fans, the importance of the international businesses, and HBO’s continued ability to attract top talent.
RICHARD PLEPLER HBO
By Anna Carugati
WS: Tell us about the rollout and take-up of HBO NOW so far and about your multilateral approach to distribution. PLEPLER: I think the most important word is “options.” What we are really striving to do is afford our consumers as many options to watch HBO as we possibly can, whether that’s through HBO GO, which comes with your subscription, and you can then watch it on whatever platform you want, or if you want to buy it as a stand-alone streaming service, you can through HBO NOW. What is important is that as the world evolves and as consumers look to different means of getting their television, we want to make sure that we have given them a wide range of options to do that. Now, what’s important to remember is that none of our growth, which in the last two years has been greater than in any two-year period in 30 years, is exclusive to any one particular distribution model. We’re growing in the cable world, in the satellite world, in the telco world and in the OTT world. That’s what I mean by multilateral, all different forms of growth. The vast preponderance of our growth will be with our cable, satellite and telco partners. It’s always important to remember that HBO GO provides the same versatility of viewing that HBO NOW provides, which is that you can watch wherever, whenever or however you want. That’s what’s key to us, and that’s how we think about the future. WS: You mentioned your cable, satellite and telco partners. How are they accepting the option of bundling HBO NOW with their offerings? Are they embracing that as a way of promoting their high-speed broadband offerings? PLEPLER: We’re in conversation with our distributors all the time. We want our distributors to do whatever is best for them to grow their business. And we want to give 10/16 WORLD SCREEN 399
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With a budget of somewhere between $6 million and $10 million an episode, Game of Thrones remains the most ambitious show on television and is HBO’s biggest hit. them as many options as they want to grow their business. So if they choose to bundle HBO NOW with their offerings, we think that’s great. If they want to sell us through skinny bundles, we think that’s great. If they want to sell us through what they call a triple-play package, we think that’s great. What we’re saying is, HBO is a great driver of the package you sell whatever that package may be. The research is pretty clear. When you have HBO inside a video bundle, you are going to get a lot less churn out of that bundle than if you don’t. And since less than 1 percent of the consumer base has left the bundle to get HBO over the top [HBO NOW], we don’t think it’s cannibalistic. We see this all as additive growth, not only in terms of the traditional ecosystem but in terms of the new ecosystem as well. WS: How does the viewing break down between linear, on demand, HBO GO and HBO NOW? PLEPLER: I think the vast majority of viewing is on connected TVs. When you look at the numbers on HBO GO and HBO NOW, by far the largest preponderance of viewing is on connected televisions. We see that as being the trend that is likely to continue. Again, the point being, we want to give our customers ways to watch HBO however, wherever and whenever they want. WS: Since you can schedule in a linear fashion and you also have HBO
NOW, which would allow you to drop as many episodes as you want, are you still seeing value in scheduling your new seasons or new show premieres one episode per week, as opposed to putting an entire season on HBO NOW? PLEPLER: Yes, and I think there’s something very dynamic and very important to the zeitgeist when people are coming every week, whatever time they want during the week, whenever they want to get another bite out of some of our extraordinary content. There’s a lot to that experience. If you think about Game of Thrones over a tenweek period occupying the cultural conversation, it raises the question, Do you really want to put that out in one bite? The way that the internet disseminates news would spoil a lot of the narrative for people. Take our wonderful series The Night Of. I can assure you, having seen it all, that the denouement of that series is a great exciting reveal. To put that out all at once and to spoil that build-up over an eightweek period diminishes the fun and expectations for your consumer. We like our model. It doesn’t mean that once in a while we may not come up with an idea where we would put up something all at once, maybe a documentary series or something, but I like the model that we have. And of course, if people want to binge, they can wait two or three weeks and then catch up and do it that way.
WS: In what areas are you seeing growth in your businesses outside of the U.S.? PLEPLER: Everywhere. Our international story is a terrific story. We grew more than 6 million new international subscriptions last year. This is very much a global company. We have close to 130 million
subscriptions all over the world. The means of distribution and the means of disseminating our content vary, and with OTT we’ve added a fourth dimension. We have our networks in 60 countries in Latin America, Asia and Europe. We license to more than 150 territories. We have Home-of-HBO deals in
HBO Films’ output this year included All the Way, with Bryan Cranston as Lyndon B. Johnson.
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12 countries around the world where we’re essentially renting our name to the partners’ brands, so Sky Italia, Home of HBO; Sky Atlantic, Home of HBO; and Foxtel, Home of HBO. And now we’ve added OTT in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil and, of course, Spain to come later in the year. So what’s exciting, again to my point about options, is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy for our international business. We look at it market by market, and we try to make a determination as to what’s the best way to monetize our content, which of course we own, and what’s the best way to expand our brand. We look at each market, and we make a determination based on answers to those questions. Perfect case studies would be in Spain, where we took a look at the market and decided the best means for future growth and building our brand was an OTT business; and in Canada, where we signed a deal with Bell Media. We decided that licensing our programming to Bell Media was the best strategy. We don’t just look at short-term profits; we look at long-term growth, and we make these decisions based on that. But we also do it in a way that, should the template change in a few years, we have the flexibility to pivot as well. WS: There are many more outlets now that are offering original programming compared to five, certainly ten years ago. Has this crowded competitive market had an impact on the programming choices that HBO makes? PLEPLER: No, but it certainly keeps us on our toes. It’s interesting that in the last five to ten years or so, where there has been a wide body of quality television, we have the biggest show in our history, Game of Thrones; we had the biggest freshman show in our history with the first season of True Detective; we have more half-hour comedies winning more awards than at any time. We have more late-night programs with John Oliver and Bill Maher and Bill Simmons (and Jon Stewart coming) than at any time in our history. And we are winning more awards and growing more subscribers and more revenue and making more profit than at any time
with his show. Over and over again, we are continuing to replenish and reimagine what the next iterations are. I’m very excited about that. Again, I make this point because I think it’s important, with all that’s happening out there, we’re doing more than ever, and we’re getting more recognition than ever, and we are continuing to do superb work. If it’s the golden age of television, the golden age has been very good to HBO. WS: Well, it can be said that HBO has contributed to creating the golden age of television. PLEPLER: I think both things are true.
HBO’s latest epic drama is J.J. Abrams’s sci-fi western Westworld, which launched in October. in our history. So, I would simply say that if we play our game and focus on what makes our brand unique and differentiated, which is working with the best talent out there, we are going to continue to have more than our fair share of acclaim and attention. This is not a zero-sum game, and I am the first to say there is other good work being done out there and I commend it. I think it’s good for our industry. My job is to make sure that HBO is playing to the best of our ability and working with the people we want to work with, the talent we believe is particularly suited to HBO: whether it’s Steven Zaillian and Richard Price doing The Night Of; Danny McBride and Jody Hill doing Vice Principals; Dwayne Johnson and Stephen Levinson doing Ballers; or J.J. Abrams and Jonah Nolan doing Westworld, and on and on the list goes. It’s the talent, and I say this over and over again, it’s all about the talent that comes to work here. That talent is sacred, and I’m very honored that our brand continues to draw and compel the best talent to come to work with us. If we can continue to do what we’re doing and play our
game, we’re going to continue to make a lot of great shows that people want to watch. WS: So the fact that there is more original programming has not impeded HBO from attracting the type of talent you want to work with? PLEPLER: Oh, I think quite the opposite. We’re working with more people across more genres than at any time in our history. And I think the proof is in the pudding across the variety of programming that we are doing. If you look at the canvas that we’re painting on now, it’s bigger, it’s broader, it involves more shows. We’re working with more people, and I don’t think the brand has ever been in a better position than now. WS: Just a word about John Oliver. What an incredible guy he is, and what a service he is rendering—investigative reporting done through comedy! PLEPLER: Well, thank you for saying that, because John is a quintessential example of expanding the canvas with great talent. As is Jon Stewart, whose voice and sensibility will be coming to the network this fall, and Bill Simmons, who started in June
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WS: Because it’s a crowded television environment, what are the challenges involved in launching a new show? PLEPLER: I think our brand is such that we make an implicit promise to the consumer: if we are stepping on stage with a show, whether it’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver or Vice Principals or Ballers or The Night Of or Westworld, we are going to do something that is differentiated from [the rest of] what you see. Because the brand is so powerful, we have a little bit of an advantage. People look to us when we are coming forward with a new show [with the expectation] that it is going to be special and it is going to be an original voice. So as long as we meet that challenge and deliver on that implicit promise, like you’ve seen us do with Vice Principals and John and Bill and The Night Of, then I think there is a built-in audience, because there is a built-in expectation of quality. WS: And your goal is still to create HBO addicts, people who keep coming back because they can’t get enough? PLEPLER: Yes, what you want to do is make sure that your shows are addictive to at least part of the consumer base. Everybody isn’t going to be addicted to everything, and it would, of course, be foolish to think that everybody is going to love The Night Of or Westworld or Silicon Valley or Veep or Game of Thrones or John Oliver, or whatever it is. But the people in your consumer base who do love a show become fanatics; they
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The political satire Veep, heading into season six in 2017, has won a host of awards, including five Emmys for lead actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus. become addicts. What we want is to get them inside our home and begin to see the richness of our work. Now, there is something we haven’t talked about, which I think is important to remember, and that’s the power of theatrical movies both here and around the world, because theatrical movies [continue to garner more than] 70 percent of viewing at HBO. It’s important to remember that they also cross a lot of demographics. You cover an enormous amount of your subscriber base with our theatrical movies, and we have the wonderful blessing of having four Hollywood studios under license over the coming years: Warner Bros.—a member of our family—Fox, Universal and Summit. Original programming gets so much attention and time in the conversation that I think it’s often obscured how big a role movies play in viewership. WS: Tell us about the VICE newscast that is launching in the fall and your relationship with VICE Media. PLEPLER: We’re very excited about VICE News Tonight. The [weekly] VICE show, which [has completed its fourth] season on HBO, has done terrifically well. They have proven that in the fields of news and public affairs, the VICE voice is also a quintessential HBO voice, and it is about great storytelling, great narrative and differentiation. We had a long conversation with Shane [Smith, co-founder and CEO of VICE] about doing a daily news show. They hired Josh Tyrangiel, who formerly was an editor at Time and Bloomberg Businessweek and a world-class journalist, to be the
executive in charge of this. I think you’re going to see a very engaging, dynamic, vibrant daily news show targeted at millennials, which looks at a very complicated world, brings it context and will end up being the next big addictive show on TV. WS: I’ve read that when asked what HBO’s biggest competitor is, instead of mentioning a specific outlet, you’ve said it’s consumers’ time. Could you expand on that? PLEPLER: If you look at the way people work and have families and sleep, there is a certain amount of discretionary leisure time. There is an enormous amount of television. John Landgraf [the CEO of FX Networks] has been quoted as saying there are 412 original scripted series. No one can keep up with all of that. This is where I think brand matters, because people look at our brand, and they know that it is a statement about quality. So when people have limited amounts of discretionary leisure time, what becomes more and more important is how entertainment is curated and organized for people, because nobody can run around 20 different places. One of the great things that HBO reflects is that you can curate great entertainment and give people great value, going back to where we started, not only because of the range in quality of our programming but the options that we provide for viewing it. And then the value proposition of an HBO subscription only goes up, because you have many options to view many different things. In a crowded environment, that speaks very well to our strategy and our future success.
WS: As you look out 12 to 24 months, what opportunities do you see for growth? And on the other hand, is there anything that keeps you up at night? PLEPLER: What’s exciting is that we are working with our distributors to incentivize them to continue to grow HBO, and we’re putting out what we think is a great product that their consumers want. We have a lot of options for how people can get HBO and options portend growth because you are simply making this great value available to more people in more different ways. I’m very pleased that our cable, satellite and telco partners all see the value of marketing HBO for their companies. That’s terrific. This is about incentivizing them to want to continue to grow HBO and
presenting options for our consumers so they can get it how they want to get it. That’s why I’m so excited about our growth. That and the fact that I am thrilled that so much talent wants to be inside our company. You have Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon coming with Big Little Lies. Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, Ed Harris and Evan Rachel Woods in Westworld. Next year you have Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer coming with The Wizard of Lies, and on and on the list goes. As we continue to draw great talent and as we make our product available to more people in more different ways, that is a great recipe for future growth and expansion of our business. What keeps me up? Well, my job is to make sure that we play our game to our fullest capacity. So I’m always thinking about whether we are doing that. Are we working with the talent we want to work with? Are we taking advantage of every opportunity in marketing and distribution? And are we expanding our creative base as broadly as we want to? I like healthy neuroticism! I think it’s a good thing. You should never sit back. Nobody at our company sits back and rests on their laurels. We’re always thinking about what’s next, and if you’re not thinking about what’s next, you’re not doing your job.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has been a breakout hit for HBO since its 2014 debut.
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EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
he French company Vivendi has a storied past. Founded by imperial decree during the reign of Napoleon III, it started as a utility company, Companie Générale des Eaux (CGE), initially supplying water to cities in France and later to Venice, Constantinople and Porto. In subsequent decades it diversified into a number of businesses, including environmental services, energy, construction and eventually communications. In 1983, CGE partnered with the French publishing conglomerate Havas to set up the pay-TV company Canal+, which launched the following year. After changing its name to Vivendi in 1998, the company embarked on a strategy to grow its entertainment holdings and acquired Seagram, which at the time owned Universal Studios and Universal Music Group. Although GE eventually bought Universal Studios, Vivendi remained committed to strengthening its position as a media company. In the last few years, it sold off its stakes in telecommunications companies. Today, under the leadership of CEO Arnaud de Puyfontaine, Vivendi has organized its businesses into four main units: Canal+ Group; Universal Music Group; Dailymotion, a leading video-sharing website; and Gameloft, a video-game developer and publisher. The Canal+ Group includes the French pay-TV service Canal+, which has recently undergone a management overhaul and business restructuring, led by Vivendi board chairman Vincent Bolloré.
Canal+ Group offers a bouquet of premium, special-interest and free-TV channels. Outside of France, Canal+ operates pay-TV businesses in French-speaking territories, notably in Africa, as well as in Poland and Vietnam. Also part of the group is STUDIOCANAL, one of Europe’s leading producers and distributors of feature films; in recent years it has been boosting its TV business with investments in companies such as Germany’s TANDEM Communications and the U.K.’s RED Production Company. To further strengthen its content business, Vivendi has been acquiring stakes in a variety of companies such as Banijay Group (which includes Zodiak Media), Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sunny March TV and Spanish outfit Bambú Producciones. Universal Music Group, which holds a 30-percent global market share of the music business, focuses on recorded music, music publishing and merchandising. It represents a broad range of artists and groups to satisfy all tastes, from contemporary artists like Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Maroon 5 and Imagine Dragons to iconic performers such as Elton John, U2, Stevie Wonder, The Beatles and Frank Sinatra. Vivendi continues to place a firm emphasis on its digital assets, with businesses such as digital radio, electronic ticket sales and film and TV SVOD platforms. It is also strengthening its position in the development of talent and live entertainment. Given the fast pace and constant growth of the video-game business, Vivendi recently acquired Gameloft, a global publisher of digital and social games for smartphones and tablets. De Puyfontaine spent much of his career in the publishing industry, holding positions at EMAP, Mondadori and Hearst. He talks to World Screen about solidly positioning Vivendi as a content company in today’s constantly evolving media world.
ARNAUD DE PUYFONTAINE VIVENDI
By Anna Carugati
WS: Vivendi has spent the last year or so streamlining and selling off some assets. What are the current strengths of the company that you would like to build on? DE PUYFONTAINE: Our strategy for Vivendi is to build a global leader in content and media that showcases its European identity. Between the big American and Asian groups, there is room for a major French and Latin-language player, and that player is Vivendi! In 2015, we sold some of our assets that no longer fit with our strategy. I can even say we sold our remaining 20-percent interest in [French telecom and cable operator] Numericable-SFR very well, with a 20-percent premium over the closing price on the day the first part of the operation was finalized. In Brazil, where the economic and financial situation has worsened, we sold [telecom company] GVT for €7.5 billion ($8.5 billion) in May 2015. Now refocused, our group consists of four solid pillars: Universal Music Group (UMG), Canal+ Group, Dailymotion and Gameloft. They are all leaders in their particular businesses: television, cinema, music, digital distribution and video games. Vivendi has leading positions in markets where talent has a central role. Discovering and nurturing all this talent feeds our activities. 10/16 WORLD SCREEN 471
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The first TV series created by best-selling novelist Harlan Coben, The Five was commissioned from RED Production Company by Sky and has been sold widely by STUDIOCANAL. WS: If you are considering acquisitions, what type of companies would fit into the group? DE PUYFONTAINE: Our strategy is simple: to bolster our positions in production and distribution of content. Over the last few months, we have acquired stakes in different production companies like Spain’s Bambú Producciones (33 percent) and the U.K.’s Urban Myth Films (20 percent), Sunny March TV (20 percent) and Guilty Party (25 percent). The group has also acquired a 26.2-percent interest in Banijay Group, one of the world’s largest independent producers and distributors of television programs, and 30 percent of Mars Films, which distributes featurelength films. All these acquisitions made in Europe reinforce our leadership in TV and cinema, whatever the format, type and nationality of the content. We want to be a key player in European audiovisual creation. MIPCOM, where you can see Vivendi, Canal+, STUDIOCANAL and TANDEM Productions, for example, allows us to showcase our talent, innovation and expertise in audiovisual production.
We have also forged partnerships with telecom operators to better distribute our content. We have a 24.7-percent interest in Telecom Italia and a 0.95-percent interest in Telefónica. Lastly, we recently acquired Gameloft, a leader in video games on mobile, a key and particularly dynamic sector of the entertainment and content market. The video-game market today is bigger than the film market and just behind music. It is crucial for Vivendi to be present in this key sector. WS: Canal+ has lost subscribers in France. What has been the reason for this? What plans do you have for the company? What type of programming would help drive subscriptions? DE PUYFONTAINE: Competition has been strong in the French pay-TV market since 2012. Financially powerful groups have entered the market, leading to a [proliferation] of offerings and sharp growth in broadcasting rights. Today, the competition is worldwide. Discovery Communications, for example, has acquired broadcasting rights for the Olympic Games from 2018 to 2024 in 50
European countries and territories for €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion). Faced with this competition, we set up a transformation plan in the summer of 2015. The objective is to restore the perception of value for subscribers by investing in what counts for them: sports and television content, and the customer experience. We have placed subscribers back at the center of our strategy. For instance, Canal+ holds the best French football and rugby rights, and we are going to continue investing in sports. The Créations Originales [original productions] like Les Revenants or Tunnel, along with films, take pole position in our programming. We have also improved the customer experience for our subscribers. We will launch a new set-top box with additional functions and a new interface. We have a superb OTT app, MyCanal, that gives subscribers access to all the channels, VOD, recommendations and versions in the original language. Lastly, we have set up a loyalty program, Canal Premier Rang, which offers subscribers the opportunity to participate in
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exclusive events: the César Awards ceremony, Top 14 matches, previews of the Créations Originales, and encounters with presenters. In parallel, we have rethought the Canal Galaxy of television channels. Today, Canal Galaxy is a set of four national pay and free channels with complementary models and clear editorial lines. At the center, the pay-TV channel Canal+ focuses on premium and exclusive programs. All these initiatives will allow us to move back into growth of subscriptions in France. While the French market is highly competitive, international and, notably, African markets offer fantastic opportunities. Active in 30 countries on the African continent, we already have more than 2 million subscribers there. WS: The French competition authority struck down a deal between Canal+ and beIN Sports. Why would that have been a good deal for Canal+? Are there plans to acquire sports on an ad-hoc basis? DE PUYFONTAINE: Canal+ and beIN Sports entered into negotiations to establish an exclusive distribution agreement. All the beIN Sports
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tions. Since the post-holiday period, subscribers were able to enjoy 150 hours of additional exclusive content, with more sports, more cinema, more Créations Originales, more culture and more entertainment. Canal’s unscrambled program has been largely re-dispatched on the three free-to-air channels: Canal8 (formerly D8), CanalStar (formerly D17) and CanalNews (formerly iTélé). It is a clearer and more coherent model, refocused on pay TV and backed by a free-to-air TV offering that will be its showpiece. The aim is to create new synergies, bolster our offering and, most importantly, establish new bridges for talent.
Globe, a division of Universal Music Group, co-produced the Oscar-winning documentary Amy. channels in France were to be available as an exclusive in the Canal+ Group bouquet of channels. This agreement was to span five years. It would have enabled the two channels to offer their customers improved and exhaustive programming while also guaranteeing better sports promotion. It is important to stress that this agreement was just one element in the Canal+ transformation plan, which, as I mentioned, aims to offer Canal+ subscribers more premium and exclusive content, a better customer experience and a loyalty program. It also provides new impetus to all our channels, now centered on the strong Canal brand. WS: Tell us more about the recently announced Canal Galaxy bouquet. Why was that important? DE PUYFONTAINE: We have re thought Canal Galaxy. Today it is a set of one premium and three free-to-air national channels, with complementary models and clear editorial lines, organized around a common denominator: the Canal brand. For the first time in the group’s history, the Canal channels are operating under a single and coherent brand, a symbol that they
are members of the same family. At the heart of this entity, the Canal+ pay-TV channel focuses on premium, with exclusive programs capable of encouraging subscrip-
WS: STUDIOCANAL is a leading acquisition, production and distribution entity, not only in feature films, but now, increasingly, in television as well. What are your plans for the studio? Do you envision it having a more important role as Vivendi transitions into a pure-play company? DE PUYFONTAINE: Vivendi owns STUDIOCANAL, which is Europe’s
largest studio. Our group is investing massively in the film industry, around €800 million ($906 million) a year. STUDIOCANAL is an essential asset for our group and is part of our strategy to be a European leader in media and content. There are huge opportunities, particularly with the other group entities. We recently acquired the Paddington Bear franchise, and a second Paddington Bear film is currently in preparation. We might also consider a Paddington Bear video game to be developed by Gameloft. This is just one example. We are working very hard on possible bridges between STUDIOCANAL (and let’s not forget its successful TV series subsidiary TANDEM), Canal+ Group, UMG, Gameloft, Dailymotion, etc. WS: What are Vivendi’s plans for Telecom Italia? DE PUYFONTAINE: Vivendi owns 24.7 percent of Telecom Italia. This capital investment in a major Italian company fits with the strategy developed by the group
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We moved from physical to downloading and then to streaming, based in particular on subscription. Music’s future is in pay streaming. UMG’s streaming and subscription revenue rose 60 percent in the first half of 2016. It represented 61 percent of digital sales. Streaming will allow us to return to growth; move into new markets, particularly emerging markets; and curb piracy, which has been endangering music for many years.
Vivendi Entertainment was formed in 2015 to develop, produce and distribute non-scripted entertainment, with highlights that include Guess My Age. and gives us a foothold in a country that shares the same Latin culture and roots. This investment represents an opportunity to be present and expand in a market with significant growth prospects and a very
strong appetite for quality content such as Canal+ Group and UMG content. We are very confident in the growth of Telecom Italia, and we intend to support it over the long term.
WS: What is your view of the music business? What future do you see for subscription models? DE PUYFONTAINE: Music is everywhere. The market has undergone radical changes in the last few years, but it still has promising prospects.
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WS: Looking ahead 12 to 24 months, in which areas do you see potential growth for Vivendi? DE PUYFONTAINE: Vivendi is present over the whole value chain, from discovery of talent to creation, publishing and distribution of content. The group has leading positions [in all of these areas]. The different acquisitions we have made over the last few months have simply allowed us to strengthen them further. Our ambition is to invest in talent by discovering and nurturing it, whether in music, television, film or video games. We also want to internationalize our distribution network, which is why we have acquired stakes in telecom operators and bought Dailymotion. Active on all continents, Dailymotion is the second biggest video platform in the world, with 400 million monthly visitors, including 20 million in the U.S. Last but not least, we want to be pioneers in developing new innovative formats like STUDIO+, the first offering of premium series for mobile screens. These series are composed of short 5- to 10-minute episodes, in every genre. They were filmed in five languages and are already attracting interest from big players like Telefónica, which will be broadcasting them in South America starting this fall. We are also launching an innovative premium audiovisual music service called WatchMusic that will be distributed with our telco partners in Latin America, in Italy and in other territories. Talent, distribution and new formats—these are the cutting-edge weapons to achieve our ambitions in the medium term.
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PRODUCERS’ CORNER
on Howard and Brian Grazer met in the early ’80s. Howard had already had a successful acting career, which started when he was a child. He came to prominence when he was cast as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and then as Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. Grazer was a producer at Paramount. They became friends and worked together on the film Night Shift, followed by their first big hit, Splash, which Howard directed. They then founded Imagine Entertainment and formed a professional partnership. They share a penchant for stories about individuals overcoming obstacles and leveraging their limits to achieve success. Together they have made some of the most memorable, beloved and critically acclaimed feature films of our time: Cocoon, Backdraft, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind (which won Academy Awards for best picture and best director, among others), The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon and many more. Their love of storytelling led them to pursue TV projects as well, most notably 24, Friday Night Lights, Arrested Development, Parenthood and Empire, among others. Recently, they ventured into the documentary space and joined forces with National Geographic Channel to produce Breakthrough. The six-part series—renewed for a second season—focused on scientific explorers working on cutting-edge projects in fields such as energy, aging, the brain, pandemics, genetic engineering and the world’s water shortage.
Howard and Grazer are also collaborating with National Geographic on the six-part miniseries MARS, an ambitious TV adventure that combines scripted drama and documentary footage. The drama tells the story of a group of scientists who reach Mars and colonize it. This story is intercut with interviews with leading scientists and experts involved in the quest to reach the Red Planet, including Neil deGrasse Tyson as well as Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX has been designing, manufacturing and launching spacecraft and servicing the International Space Station with the ultimate goal of making it possible for people to live on other planets. Beyond a like-minded approach to storytelling, Grazer and Howard share an inquisitive spirit and an ongoing desire to learn. Grazer, in fact, released a book in 2015 titled A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. In it, he tells of his ongoing passion for meeting people from all walks of life and sitting down with them to have what he calls “curiosity conversations.” Over the course of nearly four decades, he has tracked down and talked to Jonas Salk, Henry Kissinger, Carlos Slim, Condoleezza Rice, Steve Jobs, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Carl Sagan and dozens of others, including Elon Musk. Howard and Grazer talk to World Screen about MARS, their relationship with National Geographic, the creative freedom they have found working in television and what it takes to make movies today.
RON HOWARD AND BRIAN GRAZER
IMAGINE ENTERTAINMENT
By Anna Carugati
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faces and hands on the glass of mission control, watching what’s going on. I was there, and it’s so emotional because it’s the unification of everything that’s going on. It’s amazing, a group of people that are dedicated and care. And their emotions are magnetized to the control room where Elon is sitting, and it’s powerful. When you are in the crowd, they start saying stuff in a language that you don’t even understand! I’m going, What are you guys talking about? It’s English, but what is it? It’s a profound experience.
Imagine Television and 20th Century Fox Television are producing the event series Shots Fired for broadcast on FOX in 2017. WS: How did you become involved in MARS? Was it perhaps the result of a “curiosity conversation” with Elon Musk? GRAZER: It was one of these things that sort of happened in 24 hours. I had met Elon Musk years and years ago in one of these curiosity conversations. Then Justin Wilkes, [the president of entertainment] at RadicalMedia, which is a company Ron and I worked with many times because they are really good at executing high-quality material, came to us and said, Would you be interested in doing six hours on Mars? He said they’d talked to Elon Musk. I thought, Well, I know Elon Musk! I then tell Ron. Ron goes, Mars, that’s interesting! Ron gets excited about things, but it’s infrequent! But he got excited about Mars and the idea of Elon Musk being a validator of the subject. This all happened on a Thursday, and that Friday I was having lunch with Peter Rice, the chairman and CEO of Fox Networks Group. We’re friends and I never pitch things to him, but I thought, why not? This could be something he loves. So I say, “We have the opportunity to do a limited series that could be pretty awesome about Mars. Elon’s involved and so is Ron. What do you think?” And he goes, I love it! I want to do it. And I go, OK, we’ll do it with you. It just came down like that. WS: Was that the easiest pitch you ever had?
GRAZER: I cannot remember a pitch that was easier than that! HOWARD: Then there were a couple of critical creative steps that came out of the initial conversations because Elon, who is very supportive, was saying, I don’t want this to focus on me or even on SpaceX, although clearly, our mandate is that we want to go to Mars. It was set up that I would have a conversation with Elon to give him some more specifics. Before we did that, a couple of really important ideas came to the forefront. One was that we wouldn’t just do the story of going to Mars; that’s a journey that audiences are familiar with. But instead we would go further—and this is also based on reading Stephen Petranek’s book How We’ll Live on Mars and talking with Steve— and the idea became, Let’s understand what it would be like to get to Mars. Let’s understand what it would be to colonize it. And that can be [done with] scripted material. We’re going to research heavily, understand what the experts today believe it will take to go to Mars and colonize it. Let’s break that down and dramatize that and intercut that with this deep dive into not only Elon Musk and SpaceX but also a number of other groups, many through NASA, that are dedicating themselves to this notion that the time has come, and we feel there is a tipping point right now.
So I went back to Elon and I said, Of course we’d like SpaceX’s cooperation, we’d love to interview you. I told him we were going to interview a number of other experts in the area. We talked about Steve Petranek’s book, which he knew, of course. But I said this was not going to be a [series that asks whether] it’s possible to go to Mars. It presumes that we went and shows what was going on to make that possible, and what it might look like for those first intrepid pioneers. Elon loved it. And then SpaceX’s cooperation and his involvement became more cemented, but he loved the creative approach, as do I. It’s proven to be a really exciting project, and the National Geographic people have been brilliant in their support and their creative ambition for it. GRAZER: This is a bit of a digression, but Ron happened to not be in L.A. for a couple of weeks, and I was able to go to one of the SpaceX launches with Elon. We got to Tminus seven [seconds] and they had to call it off because there was a lightning storm in the sky. But it was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had. When you’re at SpaceX and there’s a launch, there’s a sort of mission control room encapsulated in the building where all of the workers work. So you’ve got the entire food chain of about 1,000 people who are making and engineering these rockets, and they all have their
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WS: That reminds me of the excitement of all the Apollo missions, which of course you have offered in various filmed forms. But I will never forget when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module on the moon. HOWARD: Oh yeah, I remember that vividly. It remains a highlight of my life. I had nothing to do with it, but just the fact that human beings could achieve that is something that has stayed with me forever. It’s been great to delve deeper into that space exploration, which I continue to believe in and support. WS: Was there anything from Apollo 13 or From the Earth to the Moon or Breakthrough about dealing with scientific topics that you were able to apply to MARS? HOWARD: Absolutely. GRAZER: Apollo 13 was the hardest movie you could imagine to get done, but Ron had figured out a way to create an architecture that was a progenitor of an architecture that could work for something like MARS. Ron should speak to it, but he was able to isolate three arenas so that [the viewer] didn’t feel complete claustrophobia being only in a space capsule. He was able to create a sense of humanity, as well as a thriller dimension and a sense of suspense that you wouldn’t imagine could happen. HOWARD: In trying to understand the facts and delve into the excitement and the adventure of the Apollo mission, I began to realize that there was this very human story, this yearning to go and to explore, but also a support system [behind
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Premiering globally on National Geographic Channel this year, MARS, which explores humankind’s quest to reach the Red Planet, is being launched at MIPCOM by Fox Networks Group Content Distribution. everything]. In the space program, what you have are the astronauts who are out there risking their lives, but you also have people with this huge emotional investment in the achievement. And then, of course, you have the loved ones and the family members. And all of
these adventure stories we certainly have applied to the scripted components of the MARS story. But it’s not even just Apollo 13 or From the Earth to the Moon, which deal directly with space. It’s also A Beautiful Mind, it’s Rush, it’s American Gangster, which are
Brian Grazer is an executive producer of Empire, the FOX show that started its third season this fall.
based on real characters and real events. So we have come to appreciate the way that truth can be depicted and dramatized and the way these themes can come to the forefront. So I think Apollo 13 was the beginning of Brian and me beginning to appreciate and understand how to find that human connection so that a story can entertain and reach you on a thematic and emotional level, but also intellectually be true to the subject matter and be informative. It’s been fun to work on all these projects, and at a documentary level, we did apply that to Breakthrough. WS: In the episode of Breakthrough, “The Age of Aging,” that you directed, I was so taken by the little old lady who was facing surgery and then decided not to have it because it was too risky. She pulled me in and made the scientific part, which wasn’t too complicated to understand, all the more relatable because I saw it through her experience. HOWARD: Well, thank you, and again, in a documentary you can’t script these things, you have to go out searching. But one of the things we were looking for was that human connection. In some of the Breakthrough episodes, it’s easier to find than in others, because you are limited by where your cameras go and what you can capture. But that idea exists in many of the other episodes, and we continue to
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encourage it for the second season. It’s all about the heroism, the commitment and the human experience at the epicenter of those acts of creation and scientific discovery, which take a lot of courage and can be emotionally powerful. WS: Will viewers also be able to have an emotional connection in MARS? Is it through the twin girls’ eyes that we will see the story? HOWARD: It’s part documentary and part dramatization, but yes, these twin girls are central. Both are scientists and engineers; one is an astronaut who goes to Mars, and one’s a mission controller and a flight director. But all of the characters are fleshed out and developed enough that you’ll have an emotional investment in their commitments, their journeys and the adventures that they experience. All of them will reflect details, concepts and ideas that are being explored and tested today. So we are going to see both sides: what the experts anticipate today, and what it may well be like for those first pioneers. WS: You are also both involved in the upcoming series Genius, which will be the first scripted series for National Geographic Channel. GRAZER: We had a script on Albert Einstein that was submitted to our company to be conceived as a feature movie.
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Howard and Grazer partnered with National Geographic Channel on Breakthrough, a show about scientific advancements that is returning in 2017. HOWARD: And it was based on Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe. GRAZER: Make sure to say that, he likes that! Walter wrote this very dense book that goes through the life of Albert Einstein when he was in Germany, when he had to flee Germany and when he came to America and [faced] this intense pressure. [Most] people don’t know that about Albert Einstein. We all essentially just grasp the iconic images of Einstein at an older age, and, of course, the profound revelatory things he did in science. But this [book] actually gives you a sense of who he was, what he was like, how he lived and what it was like getting out of Germany and getting into America— what the feeling of that was in every possible way. Ron and I gravitated toward that immediately, but we thought because we do television, it made much more sense to do it as a ten-part limited series. We were able to tell our partners that that was the way we wanted to approach it. Then we thought it should be under the umbrella of a bigger subject—genius itself. That is such a powerful lightning rod, in a sense, because it’s the perfect series for National Geographic. We are all fascinated with the superpower of genius. And we are all fascinated by what constitutes genius, and Einstein is the perfect kickoff subject for that. That’s how it evolved.
HOWARD: Courteney Monroe [CEO of National Geographic Global Networks] has been working toward creating more scripted content. GRAZER: We’re doing Breakthrough and MARS with Courteney. We’re doing Genius, and we are in talks about doing a show on the Shuttle missions, too. Peter Rice gave that to us, and we’re finding a way of synthesizing those missions into the more meaningful ones and composite characters to do what we did with From the Earth to the Moon for the Shuttle. Courteney is really good. She’s extremely decisive, and she has a unique skill as an executive for knowing what subjects pop, what things will work for the National Geographic audience but also are in our culture today. Being able to connect those two dots is her brilliance. WS: You’ve been involved in numerous scripted TV series, including 24, 24: Legacy, Empire, Arrested Development and Parenthood. There is a lot of feature-film talent that is moving to television. What creative opportunities does TV offer that are different from what film offers? HOWARD: Television is broadening the possibilities of narrative storytelling. It’s about developing characters. Television is becoming more novelistic in a deep, profound way. So great writers,
great actors, great directors and pure storytelling are gravitating toward the medium, and audiences are proving that they love it. It’s another incredibly exciting outlet. Over the years I’ve looked at a number of scripts for features on Albert Einstein, and none of them felt like they belonged in that format. But it’s fantastic the way we are able to explore his life in the ten hours that we’re going to have with National Geographic. It’s a revolution. It’s an evolution of the medium that is exciting for everybody. WS: I imagine it’s always been difficult to get a feature film made. Is it more so today because of the tendency toward sequels and remakes, or if you have a great idea, can a movie still get made? GRAZER: Movies get made purely out of forces of physics itself: just energy and focus. So you can always get something made. What studios don’t want to do is make the movies in the middle— character-driven, purposeful dramas like Apollo 13, or even The King’s Speech, which we didn’t do. There are an endless number of amazing Oscar-winning movies that the studios don’t really push for. The science of their economic paradigms have somehow [convinced the studios] that they should just make either big tentpole movies that
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are $120- or $150-million movies, or $20-million movies that are just high-concept comedies. But there are a lot of great filmmakers who want to make the movies in the middle, the tourde-force movies that have meaning and also often tell stories of redemption and triumph. And when they get made, they work as well as any other movie, but the studios are not passionate about them right now. The filmmakers that make those kinds of movies have the sensibility of the great filmmakers of the late ’60s, the ’70s and the ’80s, the Billy Friedkins, the Hal Ashbys, the Francis Ford Coppolas. That sensibility has now gone to television. And that’s why you get these great TV shows that are driven by characters and not driven by concepts. Movies are driven more by concepts and brands today. WS: Are there any upcoming movies of yours that you would like to mention? GRAZER: We do have three really good movies that are coming out. One is a movie that Ron directed called Inferno, with Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones. That is amazing, super stylistic. I think Ron applied a cinematic and filmmaking style that he applied to Rush, and it lives inside the body of this movie Inferno. It’s really cool—I can say it, he can’t! And then we just finished a movie with Tom Cruise that we love a lot called American Made. It’s a true story. It’s a gangster genre story that takes place in America in Mena, Arkansas, and in Colombia, South America, pre-Iran Contra. Doug Liman directed it. And then we have one other one that we just finished. It’s amazingly cool, [based on] a Stephen King series of books called The Dark Tower. It [stars] Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. It takes place in Cape Town, South Africa, and in New York City, and it’s very smart and stylistic. HOWARD: And we are hoping that will wind up evolving into not only more movies but multipleplatform television as well.
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ADVERTISERS’ INDEX
108 Media 33 41 Entertainment 192, 193 4K Media 247 9 Story Media Group 208, 209, 315 A+E Networks 359, 443, 475, 480, 579 About Premium Content 239 ABS-CBN International Distribution 141 ABTA 629 Alfred Haber Distribution 161 all3media International 2, 3, 393 AMC Networks International 6, 7, 595 American Cinema International 28, 29 Animasia Studio 323, 325 Animation from Spain 322 Applicaster 93 APT Worldwide 503 Armoza Formats 406, 407, 417, 425, 427 ARTE Sales 491 Artist View Entertainment 67 Asia TV Forum 550 Astro 153, 537 Atresmedia Television 121 ATV 78, 79 Australian Children’s Television Foundation 241, 243 BabyTV 251 Bandeirantes Communication Group 20, 21 Basic Lead/DISCOP 556 BBC Worldwide 412, 413 Beauty World Search 418, 419 Bejuba! Entertainment 311 Beyond Distribution 69, 101 Brightcove 532, 533 CAKE 235, 237 Calinos Entertainment 34, 35 Canada Media Fund 119 Canal 13 453 Caracol Internacional 365 Cartoon Network 317, 319, 321 CBS Studios International 95, 105 CDC United Network 627 Cisneros Media Distribution 179 CJ E&M 75, 387, 463 Comarex 83 Content Media Corp. 31 Corus Entertainment 487 Creative Media Partners 283 Cyber Group Studios 194, 195, 233, 342 Deutsche Welle 539 DHX Media 229, 231 Dick Clark Productions 107 Disney Media Distribution Latin America 603 Distribution360 485 Dori Media Group 168, 571 DQ Entertainment (International) 275 DreamWorks Animation 210, 211 DRG 363 Dynamic Television 16, 17 Eccho Rights 1, 12, 13, 14, 15 Electus International 71, 445 Endurance Media 505 Entertainment One 51, 53 Entertainment One Family 206, 207 Escapade Media 367 European Film Market 549 Federation Entertainment 635 Federation Kids & Family 225 Filmax International 139 FINAS 163 Foothill Entertainment 291 FOX Networks Group Asia 554 FOX Networks Group Content Distribution 370, 371, 414, 415, 581 FOX Networks Group Latin America 609 FremantleMedia 97, 403, 416, 470, 585 FremantleMedia International 167, 169, 347, 356, 514, 519, 522, 555, 557 FremantleMedia Kids & Family 191, 213 Gaumont Animation 253 Gaumont Television 115, 117 Global Agency 350, 351, 352, 353, 404, 405, 408, 409 Global Screen 369 GMA Worldwide 151 GRB Entertainment 127, 129, 131, 133 Green Gold Animation 289 Guru Studio 255 Gusto Worldwide Media 476, 477 Hasbro Studios 245 HBO 49 HBO Asia 523, 525 HBO Latin America 599 ICM Partners 125 IM Global Television 91 Image Nation Abu Dhabi 159 IMPS 277 Incendo 57, 59 Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) 520, 521 INK Global 216, 217, 222, 224, 226, 227 International Academy of TV Arts & Sciences 565 ITV Studios Global Entertainment 214, 215, 680
ITV Inter Medya Jetpack Distribution Kanal D Keshet International Lacey Entertainment Legendary Television Distribution Lionsgate Entertainment m4e/Telescreen Marc Dorcel MarVista Entertainment Mattel Creations/HIT Entertainment Mediaset Distribution Mediatoon Distribution Mercis Miramax MISTCO Mondo TV Motion Pictures Entertainment Multicom Entertainment Group Muse Distribution International NATPE NBCUniversal International Distribution NBCUniversal International Networks New Dominion Pictures Next Animation Studio NHK Enterprises Nordic World Novovision ORF-Enterprise Parade Passion Distribution Pol-Ka Producciones Portfolio Entertainment Pure Flix/Quality Flix Rainbow RCN Television Record TV Network Red Arrow International Rewind Networks Rio Content Market Rive Gauche Television RTVE (Corporación Radiotelevisión Española) Russia Television and Radio/Sovtelexport Saban Brands Scripps Networks Interactive Scripps Networks Latin America Scripted Secuoya Content Distribution Series Mania Serious Lunch Sesame Workshop Silver Wolf International Smilehood Media Smithsonian Channel SOMOS Distribution Sonar Entertainment Sony Pictures Television Sony Pictures Television Networks Asia Splash Entertainment Star Media Starz Storybox Entertainment Studio 100 Media STUDIOCANAL Sundance Channel Sunrights Superights Talpa Global TCB Media Rights Telefe Telefilms Telemundo Internacional Televisa Internacional Terra Mater Factual Studios The Jim Henson Company Toei Animation Tricon Films & Television Turner Asia Turner Broadcasting System Turner Networks Latin America TV Asahi Corporation TV Azteca International/AZ Content TV5MONDE Asia Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution Twofour Rights Universal Cinergia Vision Films Vivendi Entertainment Voxx Studios The Walt Disney Company WDR mediagroup WWE Xilam Animation ZDF Enterprises Zee Entertainment Enterprises Zodiak Rights
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18, 19, 348, 349, 438, 439, 576, 577 257 398 375, 420, 421 273 27 10, 11 269 165 4, 5, 185, 196, 197 249 469 272, 274, 276, 278 287 47 327, 379 271, 313, 331, 341 285 679 87 569, 633 24, 25 574, 575 499 73 489 383, 449 183 155 509 99 467 149 145 200, 201 607 572, 573 361, 447 545 625 263, 497 615 373 204, 205 143 613 511 459 389 259, 261 587 513, 553 110, 111, 333, 617, 619 77 157 8, 9 45, 589, 591 527 265, 267 377 37, 39 41 286 103 61, 597 337 202, 203 455 478, 479 385, 605 583 634 186, 451, 531, 570 137 219, 221, 223 212 495 529 22 611 437 63, 65, 631 541 43, 423 429, 481 621 547 410, 411 397 123 279 109, 593 198, 199 55, 329, 357, 483 147 335, 354, 355, 431, 433, 435
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WORLD’S END
IN THE STARS Almost every national constitution forbids the establishment of an official state religion. But this secular bent doesn’t stop people from looking to the heavens for answers to life’s most troublesome questions: Will I succeed? Will I find love? Will Donald Trump make fun of me? Every day, papers, magazines and websites worldwide print horoscopes— projections for people born in a specific month, based on the positions of the stars and planets. While many
Donald Trump
Matt LeBlanc
CUBA GOODING, JR.
Global distinction: U.S. presidential hopeful. Sign: Gemini (b. June 14, 1946) Significant date: September 26, 2016 Noteworthy activity: During the first U.S. presidential
Global distinction: American Crime Story’s The Juice. Sign: Capricorn (b. January 2, 1968) Significant date: September 18, 2016 Noteworthy activity: The official Emmys Twitter account
debate of the 2016 election, the controversial contender is called out by his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for his treatment of women, including body-shaming former Miss Universe Alicia Machado. Following the allegations that he called the beauty queen “Miss Piggy,” Trump responds on Fox News by saying he “saved her job” when pageant executives wanted to fire her for gaining weight. Horoscope: “Speak with care. If you have nothing nice to say, then it’s better to be quiet.” (bangkokpost.com)
tweets about the arrival of the People v. O.J. Simpson star at the awards show, where he’s nominated for outstanding lead actor in a limited series. The photo posted along with the announcement, however, is of Empire’s Terrence Howard. The tweet is quickly deleted and a corrected post is made, but not before savvy commenters take screenshots of the snafu. Horoscope: “Career issues will start going well for you again over the next few days, so push yourself forward and make sure important people know who you are.” (nypost.com/horoscopes)
MATT LEBLANC
weekly or monthly mes-
Global distinction: New Top Gear host. Sign: Leo (b. July 25, 1967) Significant date: September 18, 2016 Noteworthy activity: While being interviewed on the red
lives, some readers skip over them entirely. The editors of WS recognize that these little pearls of random foresight occasionally prove pro phetic. But rather than poring over charts of the zodiac to predict world events, our staff prefers to use past horoscopes in an attempt to legitimize the science. As you can see here, had some of these media figures remembered to consult their horoscopes on significant dates, they could have avoided a few surprises.
Bryan Cranston
DONALD TRUMP
people rely on these daily, sages for guidance in their
Cuba Gooding, Jr.
carpet at this year’s Emmy Awards, the actor, who’s best known for playing womanizer Joey Tribbiani on Friends, is asked if he watches Games of Thrones, to which he creepily responds: “I saw the first season and I kind of fell out of touch with it. I guess that’s when [Emilia Clarke] started getting naked—so I need to catch up.” Horoscope: “Words can come flying out of your mouth faster than you can control them. Make sure they’re the right words by taking an extra moment to think first!” (m.tarot.com)
JONAH HILL Global distinction: Big-screen funnyman. Sign: Sagittarius (b. December 20, 1983) Significant date: September 9, 2016 Noteworthy activity: The comedian is humiliated by French TV personality Ornella Fleury, who jokes about his lack of sex appeal. “My sexual fantasy would be that we’d meet up in a hotel room at night,” she tells Hill. “We would chat, you’d make me laugh; you’d make me laugh a lot. And then all of a sudden, you’d bring your friends [Leonardo] DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, and then you’d go away!” Horoscope: “If somebody hurts our feelings in any way, our reactions in the moment could hold us hostage to various forms of fear and unpleasantness.... Don’t take anything personally.” (mountaintimes.info) 678 WORLD SCREEN 10/16
BRYAN CRANSTON Global distinction: Award-winning actor. Sign: Pisces (b. March 7, 1956) Significant date: September 18, 2016 Noteworthy activity: Nominated for his portrayal of former U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson in the HBO film All the Way, Cranston is asked by a reporter on the Emmys red carpet if there’s another historical figure he dreams to play. His reply: “Donald Trump seems to be the character who you think you’d want to be able to do. They’re going to do his life story at some point, and I’d like to be considered for that…. I think it’d be huge.” Horoscope: “Remember, you might not get what you wish for, but you’ll surely get what you need, so keep your eyes open to all opportunities.” (mercurynews.com)
EMILIE DE RAVIN Global distinction: Aussie actress. Sign: Capricorn (b. December 27, 1981) Significant date: September 1, 2016 Noteworthy activity: The attractive actress claims she was “grabbed forcefully, my carry-on bag ripped out of my hand” by an American Airlines worker while traveling with a breast-milk pump. The Lost and Once Upon a Time star expresses her frustration on Twitter and demands that the airline “kindly dismiss” the allegedly aggressive employee. Horoscope: “You may want to stay close to home today. If you have travel plans, consider canceling them or rearranging your schedule.” (kajama.com)
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