by Kelly Jo Brick
Launching a new show, the expansion of live television, storytelling in a time of binge TV, the global marketplace and using data to target today’s audiences were all part of Variety’s exploration of Peak TV during their recent TV Summit. Executives, creatives, marketers and researchers discussed the current state of television as well as what they see coming next.
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF LAUNCHING A SHOW
It’s a partnership with research, marketing and development to say how can we make a show that has the right beats, that keeps people excited and gives them a moment to share in social. — Angela Courtin, Chief Marketing Officer, FOX
Campaigns don’t have to be complex to create buzz. The traditional tools, it’s not that they don’t still work, but you have to be smart about it. We had this big thing around whether Jon Snow was dead or alive. We were out of our traditional window of advertising, but there was a lot of chat about it. We happened to create, in our early exploration, this really beautiful piece of key art of Jon. We talked about does it make sense and the more we talked about it, the more we got excited about it, so we just put it up without any fanfare and it created a lot of buzz. It did what we wanted to, which was seize on a conversation that was happening on it’s own, but it was a really simple asset. — Pam Levine, Chief Marketing Officer, HBO
THE ROYALS was our first launch of an original scripted series. What we’re really focused on is how are we creating custom content to speak to our millennial women audience. They are in digital and social and want all this content. So we want to engage this audience and surround them so that they are becoming activists on our behalf, so they’re actually working media. They’re evangelizing the brand and the show. — Jen Neal, EVP Marketing, E! & Esquire
THE STATE OF THE TELEVISION INDUSTRY
You have to take risks. Any version of playing it safe is out the window. — Jeff Wachtel, Chief Content Officer & President, Universal Cable Productions & Wilshire Studios
A danger that we’re sort of circling right now is doing shows and trying to just make them noisy for the sake of breaking through the pack. I think that the most successful shows, they exist for a reason. Meaning the reason I was drawn to SHARP OBJECTS is really it’s about women and violence and tendency of violence that women have innately that we don’t talk about very much in our culture and it ends up coming out in these kind of perverse ways. It just felt to me like something that hadn’t really been explored on TV before. That’s the thing I think will really help series get noticed. — Marti Noxon, Creator & Executive Producer, UNREAL, CODE BLACK, GIRLFRIEND’S GUIDE TO DIVORCE
It’s about creating great content that connects with the audience and then ancillary content that goes across all those platforms. If you have great content that carries across all the platforms, monetization will catch up. — Chris McCarthy, President, VH1 & Logo
It’s a game of matchmaking. Whether it’s talent to content or audiences to devices and understanding the psychographics of those audiences, not just the demographics. Are you really passionate about exercise? Are you passionate about Hollywood life? Understanding those nuances is incredibly important because those nuances beyond demographics will then inform how wide content can spread. — Stephanie Gaines, VP Corporate Marketing, YuMe
The broadcast networks are at a significant disadvantage in terms of the quality of talent attracted to work there and I think the networks are reacting to that by enhancing financial incentives, which is not something they’ve done in a long time, but something they need to do in order to bring back to broadcast television the quality of writer who used to go there first. — Peter Benedek, Co-Founder, Partner & Board Member, United Talent Agency
Brand identity is something that we’re losing. I think that’s the biggest challenge that broadcast has now. What is ABC? What is Fox? What is CBS? What is NBC? How do you get people to say I’m going to watch NBC tonight opposed to I’m going to watch whatever hit show happens to be on there? — Jeph Loeb, Head of Television, Marvel Studios
As recently as about 5 or 6 years ago, minorities could only be on television if that’s what the show was about. As though I wake up every morning going, “How am I going to be South Asian today?” I see that slowly changing. — Mindy Kaling, Actor, Writer, Director, Producer, THE MINDY PROJECT
NBC’S INNOVATIONS WITH LIVE TV
It reminds me of when I was growing up, everybody would watch TV together, so with THE WIZ, I have young kids who saw THE WIZ. I have older grandparent types saying I saw THE WIZ. So everybody got together on that night to see something and do something together. — Kenny Leon, Director, HAIRSPRAY LIVE, THE WIZ LIVE
On rewriting A FEW GOOD MEN for live TV: I am very excited to write it over again. It was my first play, it was my starter play. I’m very proud of it, but it still feels a little like my high school yearbook picture to me. I hope that I’m a better writer now because I have some experience under my belt. It’s going to be A FEW GOOD MEN. “You can’t handle the truth,” you just don’t cut that, but I’m looking forward to attacking it just for the sake of a rewrite, as well as it should be written for this particular production. — Aaron Sorkin, Creator & Executive Producer, A FEW GOOD MEN
A couple of weeks ago there was a New York Times article about the fact that this season on Broadway was the highest grossing box office in history and the most tickets sold in history. There was an interview with the head of the League of New York Theaters and they were asked why. Of course you have HAMILTON and other things like that, but they named SMASH, SOUND OF MUSIC LIVE and THE WIZ LIVE as reasons that theater has now reached a national audience that has created an appetite for people to go and see shows live on Broadway. — Craig Zadan, Executive Producer, THE WIZ LIVE, HAIRSPRAY LIVE
THE FUTURE OF TELEVISION & PEAK TV
It’s very, very hard to make great television. You have to have so many things go right. You have to have beautiful writing, the right cast, the right director. You have to do it again and again and again and again. What that really requires, is unbelievably exceptional people who are show creators and there are only so many that are that incredible. What it really means, from a standpoint that there is great television out there right now, it will start to become diminishing returns in terms of the quality and people putting a lot of money into it, just because we can’t grow great showrunners and creators and great talent fast enough. — Jocelyn Diaz, EVP, Original Programming, EPIX
There are a lot of opportunities to tell interesting stories, explore a wide range of content and all the networks are competing to have really great content so I think that puts content creators in a good position that if they want to tell an interesting story, they’ll have a chance to be heard and seen. — John Legend, Singer-Songwriter, Executive Producer, UNDERGROUND
On what’s next in reality: There’s definitely a return towards simplicity. LITTLE BIG SHOTS is a perfect example of boiling down the talent show to its basic element and with the right casting, it just zings. I think that in formats and in docuseries the trend is moving toward simpler, more real, more authentic, more documentary style. — Doug Ross, CEO, Evolution
Kelly Jo Brick is a TVWriter™ Contributing Editor. She’s a television and documentary writer and producer, as well as a winner of Scriptapalooza TV and a Sundance Fellow. Read more about her HERE.
