World Screen 30th Anniversary Report

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THE MAGAZINE OF INTERNATIONAL MEDIA • APRIL 2015

www.worldscreen.com

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ANNIVERSARY REPORT

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BY ANNA CARUGATI

30 Years of World Screen Five years ago, after publishing our Silver Edition, which marked the 25th anniversary of World Screen, part of me wondered how we could possibly top all that we had already accomplished—what with so many in-depth interviews with heads of media companies, programming and channel executives, showrunners and actors.

But after our celebration at MIPTV 2010, we buckled down and redoubled our efforts so we could continue to offer our readers online and in print a window to the most important movers, shakers, decision-makers, creatives and even disruptors in media. The fact that the media business has changed more in the last five years than in the previous 50 has been a fortuitous coincidence for us.

To mark our 30th anniversary, I collected quotes from interviews we have done in the last five years and arranged them in a sequence that offers a narrative about the developments in programming for the small screen.

This special 30th Anniversary report is divided into three sections. In The View from the Top, presidents and CEOs of major media companies explain some of the trends in the content business and look ahead to what’s next. Then, through the words of top programming executives and showrunners, we learn about this new age of Auteur Television and the migration of feature-film talent to the small screen. We then focus on our Top 10 list of dramas and let executives, showrunners and actors describe the shows that have created the most buzz, garnered the highest ratings or won the most awards.

I would like to emphasize that what is compiled in this report is the fruit of the labors of many people, certainly not just my own. Mansha Daswani and Kristin Brzoznowski conducted many of the interviews. Victor Cuevas adds beauty and visual clarity with his layouts. And Ricardo Guise acts a bit like the North Star, offering direction when we reporters and editors get a little lost in the excitement and minutiae of our interviews.

Lastly, I would be terribly remiss if I didn’t thank the executives, producers, distributors, showrunners and actors—and their respective publicists and PR representatives—who place their trust in us and give so generously of their time.

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The View from the Top Over the last five years, technology and online services have seemingly colluded to give consumers more and more ways to watch what they want when they want. As a consequence, media executives have had to grapple with the resulting disruption of the business by offering content on multiple platforms, understanding its value and monetizing it properly. Successful executives are also constantly looking ahead, trying to anticipate consumers’ needs and behaviors, ready to serve them with the right content and products. nal content that frankly has nothing to do with CBS content. So overall you could say CBS is trying, as we do on our network and on Showtime, to put premium content in as many available places as people can get it, and the content can come from CBS or it can come from elsewhere as well.

JOSH SAPAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, AMC NETWORKS, 2011:

LESLIE MOONVES, PRESIDENT & CEO, CBS CORPORATION, 2011: The strategy has been, how do we best maximize the content that is currently on the CBS network or Showtime, which is also one of our assets, and make it available either as full episodes or some offshoot of those shows?

TV.com is also a social-media site for commenting on television shows. At the same time, with sites like CNET and the games site, we want to offer origi-

If we first look at cable on demand, which is content on a cable system that subscribers can access, what you see in statistics from cable operators is that the use of on-demand as opposed to linear viewing increases by the day…a seismic shift is taking place. You particularly see it among younger people. The trend is moving away from linear schedules— television when it’s assigned—toward television when you want it. And I think that the next generation will view TV a lot more in terms of timing and time frame, like they view the web. That is to say, they won’t first think when it’s on, they will first think of when they want it and make an assumption that it will be there when they want it. Linear television scheduling is still important today in terms of the economic construct, but in the broader mix of DVRs and authentication and multiplatform—with the exception of live events—it will increasingly become a less important construct.

TED SARANDOS, CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER, NETFLIX, 2011: I think that people should not be threatened by Netflix, they should embrace it and be excited about it. The revenue opportunity that will come from taking

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local content global is much greater than the local threat will be. We very actively don’t get into the crosshairs of cable operators, because we think that the thing that people most value on television is live events and sports, and I’ve come to that conclusion because that’s what people pay the most for and that’s what has the highest ratings. So we are completely out of that business—we don’t pursue sports licenses, we don’t do American Idol or The X Factor in any country. I’m not into results-oriented shows, I really am looking for long shelflife content. So we stay out of the thing that’s most valuable to most suppliers, which keeps the existing food chain pretty stable. What we do is offer a different way to monetize that content and it’s differentially attractive to consumers, and we price it low enough that you don’t have to cancel or get rid of anything else to afford it. It’s bringing the efficiencies of the internet to an otherwise slightly inefficient market and actually expanding the revenue for everybody and more importantly growing consumer excitement for content. I grew up a complete TV nerd—I knew all the character’s names, I knew what was going on, I was excited about the fall season. Now I find that people have no relationship to content whatsoever because there’s so much clutter in the market that you’re unlikely to find something that you love. We really focus on finding something that you’ll love.

ADAM CROZIER, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, ITV, 2012: Television has been remarkably resilient and, if anything, has grown over the last few years, and social media is driving

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that—ITV has something like 20 million Facebook likes. There is fantastic opportunity in the fact that people can now watch TV in places they could never watch before: sitting on a train or a bus, in the back of a car. People can get access to simultaneous schedules when they are watching on iPads or Android.

And increasingly, we will be offering consumers the opportunity to access our archives as well, which opens up new revenue opportunities.

The really big thing here is that television has a future where it doesn’t just reach mass audiences on linear TV, but also those watching on connected TVs. That represents a wonderful opportunity for us, but I don’t ever see it taking over from traditional television. If you get your programming right and you’ve got great, must-see programs, then linear TV will survive and prosper.

JEFFREY BEWKES, CHAIRMAN & CEO, TIME WARNER, 2011: Linear channels have already become branded environments, so when you go to HBO or TNT or MTV you know what kind of programming you will get. What branded linear channels

have to do is take the programming that makes them a branded environment—a clear voice—and offer it on demand. There is one channel that has already done that, and that is HBO. It’s been on demand in the U.S. now for ten years and has very high usage of on-demand viewing. Depending on the show, upwards of 30 to 50 percent of the viewing on HBO is on demand.

There is no reason that the same thing could not happen to CNN or MTV or NBC or any other channel. If you like the channel and like the shows, and you have the shows on demand, you’ll tend to watch them when you want to watch them.

It’s a very complex equation, because we all have a pretty good poster boy for how not to do it, and that’s the music business. They did everything they could to avoid new business models, and it’s taken away 50 to 60 percent of their business, probably on a permanent basis. That’s a pretty good cautionary tale—don’t ignore the new models.

On the other hand, don’t commit suicide. These are very lucrative existing businesses, and you certainly don’t want to encourage their demise. You have to be very close to consumers, you have to experiment, and you have to look for ways that you think are likely to build new businesses.

JON FELTHEIMER, CO-CHAIRMAN & CEO, LIONSGATE, 2011:

PHILIPPE DAUMAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, VIACOM, 2013:

Content creation drives the whole value chain. You take something that reaches an audience and has long-lasting value and then you build a distribution pattern and a business model around it.

You can’t create a deal and then look for content that fits the deal.

Fragmentation within the digital marketplace fits our business model of targeting large niche audiences, and that has changed the game for us. A lot of shows, particularly cable and paytelevision shows, can generate really significant profits in a digital world by aggregating lots of revenue from lots of platforms without attracting the tens of millions of eyeballs that broadcastnetwork shows do. A show like Mad Men, whose loyal audience isn’t that broad but is really deep and continues to increase on a long-term basis, can air on multiple platforms over a long period of time and become a very, very valuable franchise.

We may have learned a little something from what happened to the music industry in some respects, and when appropriate, we’re cautious about what relationships we enter into as we get into new distribution platforms. We are very welcoming of new ways to reach consumers—it’s the lifeblood of our business—but we do it in a way that is consistent with our overall business objectives. We try to give consumers more, in different ways, but we do it in a way that also preserves the underlying economics of our companies, which, in turn, allows us to make better and better content. If you look at video content in general, the variety and quality keep going up. Yes, there is a lot of variety in music, but it’s always a three- or four-minute song, whereas because the budgets in television are so huge, there are cinematic-quality television shows. And each of our networks spends more every year. We have increased our investment in programming every year over the last several years, including during the recession. We cut costs everywhere we could, but not on the content part.

When you take the cumulative impact of all the companies investing in content, there is more and more choice, not just more types of shows, and the quality keeps going up.

PETER CHERNIN, CHAIRMAN & CEO, THE CHERNIN GROUP, 2012: [Digital platforms are] an extraordinarily complicated and challenging issue…. One of the things I always used to say when I was running News Corp. was that our job isn’t to protect things, because ultimately you can’t protect them. Our job is to do the best possible job we can in maximizing the amount of revenue we get out of the existing businesses. But at that same time we need to build new business models faster as the old ones may or may not decay.

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GUILLAUME DE POSCH, CO-CEO, RTL GROUP, 2013: Digital is important for the whole of RTL Group. FremantleMedia is a content creator, and can therefore be

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The even bigger challenge is to establish and develop the right business models, so that in the future it really won’t make a difference, in financial terms, what devices and services viewers watch our content on. To achieve this, we also have to add a new skill set to our group: technology. We are great at producing content, at scheduling and selling TV commercials, but state-ofthe-art technology is a key driver for our digital businesses, from online advertising sales to audience measurement and video recommendations.

DAVID ZASLAV, PRESIDENT & CEO, DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS, 2014:

platform neutral. Bare in mind that certain criteria need to be met when you are doing business with all platforms: What level of exclusivity do you grant?

What price do you receive for your show? How protected is your show from a copyright point of view? What kind of marketing does the platform offer? All these questions are weighed

by FremantleMedia in their decisions regarding whether to be on one channel or another.

ANKE SCHÄFERKORDT, CO-CEO, RTL GROUP, 2014: Nonlinear TV services have clearly increased the complexity of the TV business: you can watch programs for free, financed by advertising. You can pay per view for a single episode or buy a season pass. Or you can pay a monthly subscription fee to get an “all you can watch” TV menu. In four key European countries—Germany, the U.K., France and the Netherlands—subscriptionbased VOD revenues grew by 108 percent in 2013 alone. The consequence: if possible, we have to secure as many rights as possible to exploit content across all platforms and services.

It is a great time to be in the content business, especially for a company like Discovery, because we own most of the rights to everything we produce. As viewers seek to consume content on new platforms and devices, it creates more demand from distributors for those rights and more opportunities for Discovery to gain additional value for that content.

TV Everywhere is an attractive solution for both content providers and distributors, because it preserves the traditional cable model and bundle.

For programmers, it is measurable, so we can earn advertising revenue for viewers who are watching on mobile devices and tablets. For distributors, it is authenticated, so viewers need a cable subscription to view content.

JEFFREY KATZENBERG, CEO & DIRECTOR, DREAMWORKS ANIMATION, 2013: There is a whole new platform that is very quickly revealing itself as a new form of engagement for audiences. Here is the way I would explain it. In the 1950s, television came along and it filled these very big gaps that existed in all our lives, meaning, what do you do before you go to school, before you go to work, while a housewife is doing chores around the house, coming home after work, after dinnertime, on weekends? This incredible thing called television—the linear experience—filled these gaps. Six and a half hours a day, that is what the average American is spending watching television—it’s kind of astounding.

Then about four or five years ago, a confluence of things happened that started to reveal that in addition to these gaps that people have in their lives, they

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also have spaces—the in-betweens. The in-between is when you are waiting for an appointment. Or when you’re on a bus going to your job. Or you are waiting for a friend outside a store. Or you arrive early to a dinner at a restaurant. In your day, there is an amazing amount of inbetween moments. Suddenly a portable device comes along that allows you to fill those in-between moments…. This is a very fast evolution that is driven by the device itself. Today, we have in our hands devices that can deliver rich media instantly. Five years ago that did not exist. As these devices got smarter and smarter, so became the quality of what you could do in these spaces. Today, and this is where AwesomenessTV comes along, and what Brian Robbins calls “bits, bytes and snacks,” which are filling this incredible place of opportunity. I’ll say something certainly bold, it may turn out to be stupid, but I’ll say it: five years from now, the in-between moments that we have in our lives—and the smartphone is going to expand what we can do in those moments—are going to be as valuable as the gaps. Because our lives are getting filled up with many more things every day, we will have more in-between times than gaps, and in a handful of years the value of that in-between time will be as valuable as what we call television today…. I think people are going to be surprised by what starts to happen in these spaces. I will not be surprised if three or four years from now there will be a series as compelling and as exciting to me as Homeland is, and for which I get a five-minute episode every day, and pay for it. If somebody could tell me that starting next year there will be another season of Breaking Bad but it’s going to be in snacks rather than in full meals— every day five days a week, I’ll get a fiveminute serial on Breaking Bad—I would be there.

JOSH SAPAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, AMC NETWORKS, 2014: There has been an increase in viewership and utilization of off-linear services, whether it’s cable on demand, satellite on demand, or internet subscription video services, inasmuch as they have the shows, which from us is generally a year after they air. What is curious is that we have seen our linear ratings escalate rather dramatically, while the utilization or consumption of on-demand has increased at the same time.

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Perhaps the most notable example of that is Breaking Bad, which in season one was doing a little over 1 million viewers, and by the time season five aired, the last episode did more than 10 million viewers. That is an interesting phenomenon because there is generally an intuitive assumption that there is a certain number of viewers and if they see it in one place, they won’t see it in the other place. That historically has been a bit of a media paradigm: if you window material and you put it here first, then people won’t watch it there, second, as much…and what we are seeing is somewhat of the inverse, which is that the sampling of shows on the various on-demand platforms, cable, satellite, transactional (by which people often mean iTunes, rented or subscription), is exposing more people to shows like Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and Mad Men on AMC…and [they] are then coming back in greater numbers to the show on linear. Whereas one may have conjectured that linear was under terrible pressure, in fact, for the shows that are really popular on demand, it has boosted their importance and appeal on linear, if they have the right genetics. I would describe those genetics as being, most importantly, timeliness and urgency.

JAMES MURDOCH, CO-COO, 21ST CENTURY FOX, 2014: We look at the channel business generally as an engine for creating content and programming. Up until now the best way to get a lot of choice and quality in front of customers has been to bundle linear channels together, because that’s the way the technology works. Increasingly, customers are enjoying streaming programming and having more ondemand viewing, and for us that’s really not that different; it’s actually a really great product to make. We are pushing ahead very hard on our over-the-top services, with our investment in Hulu, [and] our authenticated nonlinear ser vices. For example, the FXNOW app, an authenticated app in the U.S., is a tremendous product for the FX brand, which stands for unique quality television programming. The FXNOW app offers on-demand viewing of series, full series stacks in many cases. It’s a great product, which really resonates with customers. We think that the channel business, generally speaking, will move

increasingly to streaming services, and that’s why it’s so important for us to have a number of brands that really stand for something and are destinations where people in an on-demand environment can find programming they love. There is no question that the live viewing of sports is very unique and is something that drives a lot of value for some of these brands. But it’s not a defensive game, it’s more about how you can make products for customers that really work, that deliver the programming that they are going to love, in the easiest way possible. Increasingly, that’s streaming services, and that’s why we are very involved in that marketplace.

TONY HALL, DIRECTOR-GENERAL, BBC, 2014: Linear channels still have a long life ahead of them. For all the success of catch-up services, all the facts show that people still enjoy watching TV live and together.

TV channels are, in a way, social media in the true sense of the term.

When England played Italy in the World Cup earlier this year, BBC One had an audience of more than 15 million at nearly midnight. This August more than 2 million Scots (out of a population of 5.3 million) watched the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. It was the third-bestperforming program in Scotland since 2001—showing that the power of television to bring people together around big national events is undiminished.

In fact, we are seeing a new trend starting—perhaps unexpectedly. There are more big events than a few years ago, and those big events are getting bigger. So in the future, we will need to find the right blend of engaging, wellscheduled linear channels and distinctive on-demand content, so that everyone feels they are getting something from the BBC.

NANCY DUBUC, PRESIDENT & CEO, A+E NETWORKS, 2014: We work hard to constantly stay aware and be prepared for what’s next in technology and the ways our audience consumes content. But we are a content company. Period. That’s the part we control. So for us, remaining relevant requires taking the insights we glean from our tech-savvy audience and tailoring our content accordingly.

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We want every experience with our brands, our shows and our characters to entertain and delight—and that means something slightly different on each platform. So part of our creative process is to think through delivering a great experience on each one.

LESLIE MOONVES, PRESIDENT & CEO, CBS CORPORATION, 2014: The number of people who are watching on linear channels is still close to 75 percent of the total viewership. They are still watching shows at the time they are on. But as the world changes, we are prepared for the shifting schedule.

Nielsen is becoming more sophisticated in counting time-shifted viewers and audiences on all platforms. We are fully prepared, so that as more people watch a show three days or seven days after it airs, or on CBS.com, they will be counted, and that’s fine with us. The back end becomes as important as, if not more important than, the front end. And as viewers are changing their habits, it is still about having the best content, and that’s all we care about. How they watch it, when they watch it, as long as it’s counted, it’s fine with us.

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Auteur Television Showrunners and programming executives point to The Sopranos as the show that changed the course of television drama. It ushered in an era of flawed, complex characters, likable antiheroes and sophisticated serialized storytelling. This new creative environment, which rewards auteur television, has attracted countless feature-film writers, actors and directors. They are finding the nuanced characterdriven storytelling on the small screen more satisfying than the many franchise movies and sequels being produced in Hollywood.

RICHARD PLEPLER, CO-PRESIDENT, HBO, 2012: The Sopranos was of course a transcendent piece of popular entertainment, but we are not looking to ever find the next Sopranos—there is no such thing. What we are looking for always is the next high-quality piece of programming, and we believe, with gratitude, that Boardwalk Empire represents that, Game of Thrones represents that, Luck represents that and

True Blood represents that. Aaron Sorkin’s new show The Newsroom, Armando Iannucci’s new show called Veep, Lena Dunham’s new show called Girls, these are all, in our opinion, in the tradition of HBO highquality programming. That is what we are selling.

It’s very important that you define success correctly every day. And there is always the temptation to define success as your last success. And the truth is that success is really about original voices. And you never know when that original voice is going to come in the door. So you need to have a culture which is responsive and open to those original voices.

MICHAEL LOMBARDO, PRESIDENT OF PROGRAMMING, HBO, 2012: It’s not correct to say we don’t care at all about ratings. It is certainly one of the things we look at. You want to know that your show is connecting with some group. I don’t think we’re making decisions based solely on the number of eyeballs.

What we are looking for is: Does the show have places to go creatively?

Are there places the creator still wants to take us that still feel vital and interesting? And it’s very important to us that the shows feel like there is passionate engagement by the consumer. Our shows don’t have to be everyone’s favorite, but they better be somebody’s favorite. When someone is making a decision every month, whether to continue paying for HBO, there has to be something on our service that they just can’t imagine not having every month.

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For some people that show is a miniseries like Mildred Pierce, an original film like Too Big to Fail, boxing or series like True Blood and Game of Thrones.

JOHN LANDGRAF, CEO, FX NETWORKS, 2013: Part of what I realized is that when you look at the explosion of quality programming that has come out of America in the past decade, particularly since The Sopranos initially premiered on HBO, and then a couple of years later, when The Shield premiered on FX, we really liberated storytellers.

Before that, storytellers either had to fit their ideas into a two- or three-hour film, or had to make a series that would go 22 episodes a year and hopefully make well in excess of 100 episodes. That really limited the number of subjects and types of approaches one could take to a series.

When The Sopranos came along, all of a sudden you could do a 13-episodea-year series that had continuity and was essentially a 90-hour movie told over seven years. It just exploded and opened a massive door to quality. I could name so many amazing series that came out of that. While we absolutely are still going to continue to make what I call these 90-hour movies that are essentially seven-year and 13episode television series (and hopefully Justified will go the distance and Sons of Anarchy will go the distance and The Americans will go many years), I really believe there are all kinds of great stories that we are not telling that optimally should be told, not in two hours and not in 90 hours but in 10 or

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20 hours or 30 hours. So, for example, we’ve made a deal for a show called The Strain with noted director Guillermo del Toro. When Guillermo came in and pitched it, it was based on a trilogy of books that he and his coauthor Chuck Hogan had written. As he said, this will either be three, four or five seasons, but it won’t be two, and it won’t be six or seven. It will be somewhere between 39 and 65 episodes.

When I read the books I thought, He’s definitely right, we’d have to compact it to do fewer, and we’d have to stretch it to do more. So part of what we realized is we really need to figure out how to adapt our business models to create even more flexibility in terms of the types of choices that storytellers make.

The more we can figure out the business model around a story that is good, the better the content that we are going to get.

CHRIS ALBRECHT, CEO, STARZ, 2014: [The straight-to-series order] is one of the things that people are copying from us. It’s what Netflix is doing.

It’s what HBO just did with True

Detective. People are now realizing that the straight-to-series order is not unusual, it’s a viable option when they are thinking about how to get in business with people. We’ve learned how difficult it is, especially with these big serialized dramas, to just go right into production without a pilot, so we’ve been spending more money in the development process.

If we get a script and we like it, we’ll then put together a small writers’ room. We will then break out the entire season and a few episodes so we really are much more prepared when we go into production. By getting as much of the writing done, you have a better chance of understanding where the series is going.

Even though that doesn’t solve all of the issues, such as, Do I have the right actor in the right role? Is my cinematographer shooting it the way that I hoped he would? Those are a few of the things you get to see when you do a pilot. We are getting better at anticipating the challenges of working without a pilot. When I was at HBO we didn’t do a pilot for Rome. We went right to Rome and shot it and looked at the first three episodes and went, Oh oh! This isn’t what we were hoping for! But we had so much money we went back and reshot it. The days of spending that kind of money are over.

CARLTON CUSE, SHOWRUNNER, THE STRAIN, 2014: [With Lost we] ended up violating a lot of rules of television that we were told were inviolable: we had a complicated mythology, we didn’t make a lowest-common-denominator show, it required that you sit forward and pay attention, it wasn’t spoon-fed to you. There was intentional ambiguity, which was something that really intrigued me as a storyteller…. The lesson that came out of Lost was that you could subvert expectations and that in subverting those expectations you give an energy to your show that would really engage an audience. And the legacy of that can be seen on a show like Game of Thrones. The surprising and unexpected death of major characters is something that we did on Lost, and they have taken the mantle of that and run with it very successfully. In

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television the idea of complicated characters that are neither good nor bad is something we were on the forefront of in network television.

We could take risks and be commensurately rewarded by an audience embracing our show for all the things that were ultimately novel about it.

RYAN MURPHY, SHOWRUNNER, AMERICAN HORROR STORY, 2014: When I got Popular on the air in 1999, the landscape had started to change. Things had started to move.

There was Steven Bochco, and David E. Kelley, and David Chase was in the middle of his great success on The Sopranos. But there was no real cable like there is today, so broadcastnetwork executives had a lot more power to dictate rules and say, You have to do this note or we’re not airing your show, or, You’re fired. I remember the network executives on Popular saying some of the most appalling things about women, about gay people, about sexuality, just because they were afraid. They were afraid of protests. They were afraid of losing advertisers, and I would try and fight them the best I could. I didn’t win all those battles.

Right around when Nip/Tuck started, that’s when things started to change and that’s when the term “showrunner” came in. That began in the early 2000s, the rise of auteur television, and that was about a vision and that vision is everything.

It’s respected and admired and listened to more than it ever was before. Now I don’t really get notes from executives. I get this amazing thing—I get brilliant ideas from them. They say, Look, this is your show and you’re going to do what you want to do and we have empowered you and believe in you, but what if we tried this, or what if we tried that? And that is what showrunners are lucky enough to do now. It feels more creative, and it’s about a singular voice.

The landscape of how notes are given has changed. And now [network executives] want you to push the envelope; now they want you to be more daring. Back then, forget it, it was not in the water, at least not in my experience. There is much more

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freedom now. Different voices are more celebrated than ever before, because with a strong voice comes success and ratings. People are learning that. The 18th watered-down sitcom about a family living in New York, nobody wants to watch that anymore. They used to, but I think people are changing and we are in the midst of a great revolution.

DAVID SHORE, SHOWRUNNER, BATTLE CREEK, 2014: The division between cable and network scares me a little bit because, look, [with House] I couldn’t show nudity on FOX, I couldn’t swear and I had to come in at exactly 42 minutes and 43 seconds, or something like that. In terms of the topics I explored, there was never a time when they said no. And I worry that the networks are running away from shows they think are cable shows.

Good TV is good TV. Good storytelling is good storytelling. And a show like NYPD Blue, which was just a great, great show, probably wouldn’t be put on a network today. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be. Even going back to a show like All in the Family, [if it were pitched to] a network today. It worries me, this division we constantly talk about, because I don’t think there needs to be such a division.

KEVIN BACON, ACTOR, THE FOLLOWING, 2013: I had been looking for about three or four years [to do episodic TV]. I had different layers of snobbiness and resistance to the whole idea, based on the fact that when I started out as an actor, I had done a soap opera, and my attitude was, once you say goodbye to television you don’t go back unless things are really not going well for you. That’s an antiquated notion of the industry based on the late ’70s, which is when I started. Then I saw Kyra’s experience on The Closer [Kyra Sedgwick, Bacon’s wife, starred in the TNT cable drama] and I started to adjust my thinking about it. We were at the dawn of a new age of television, going back to The Wire and The Sopranos and all these television shows that were having such a major

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impact on popular culture. The writing was so good and the performances were so exceptional that I started to say, Hey, maybe I should be part of that. So I threw my hat in the ring and we started this search to find something that would be cool, and that involved also developing things. I had a couple of projects in development. These things take time. I read one amazing script after another and was totally jazzed about the idea now of finding the right thing. I was also very resistant to the idea of network television because I felt like the schedule was going to be too long and the quality wouldn’t be as good as, say, on premium cable.

Then I read The Following, and it had all the things that I was looking for.

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN, DIRECTOR & EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, WAYWARD PINES, 2014: When you’re writing and directing your own movies, it’s a long cycle.

When I’m doing my thrillers it’s probably two years, at the fastest a year and three-quarters, between movies. The last two movies I made were big CGI studio films. There were three years between [each release]. In fact, because they were big CGI movies, I didn’t have that intimacy of the art form that I thrive on. At the end of the day, the dinner table scene is my favorite scene.

[Wayward Pines] allowed me to work with a battalion of actors that I wanted to work with. If I read a movie that simply doesn’t have enough parts that are fit for a whole bunch of actors I’d like to work with, well that’s another two years that I can’t work with them. My selfish goal is to tell stories that I’m interested in, in a long form on TV, and then put world-class actors in all the roles.

That excites me, it motivates me….

You have to work really fast in TV. So you’re stripping away all your comforts and bad habits, especially when coming off two giant movies.

The beauty of the TV show was, as we were [in production], the network and I would say, “We really love this scene,” or “This character has now blossomed, I’d love to put that moment in the pilot,” or “I need to bring this out in this character.” It was a fascinating experience, because it also taught me a kind of perma-

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nent vigilance through the process of post-production. I didn’t think of it in the traditional film format of, you prep, you shoot, that’s it, let’s see what your grade is at the end of it.

You think of it as listening to the story the whole time, and you work that into how you’re making the [show].

In the movie industry, if you’re not making X, Y, Z comic-book version number ten, if you’re not interested in that or don’t fit into that dynamic, there’s not a lot of space for you. At least 40 percent of movies now are that. We’re certainly not making Terms of Endearment or Kramer vs.

Kramer anymore. So there are a lot of world-class actors on the table. I think that’s what the pull of TV is right now—it’s honoring resonance.

And that’s a great thing for all of us.

JON BOKENKAMP, CREATOR & EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, THE BLACKLIST, 2014:

JAMES SPADER, ACTOR, THE BLACKLIST, 2013:

I will take you back to an experience that I had in 1990 when a rather prophetic series of statements were made by one of most remarkable filmmakers of all time, Sir David Lean. Jack Lemmon—with whom I had at that point worked on a couple of occasions, although we hadn’t done Glengarry Glen Ross yet; this was 1990, we did Glengarry in 1992—invited me to come sit at his table at the AFI tribute to Sir David Lean. It was, as you would expect, a very beautiful, poignant tribute to this man for his body of work. And when it came to the time that he was going to accept the award at the end of the evening, he dedicated his entire acceptance speech to [addressing] the heads of the studios, or as he said that night, “I want to speak to you money men out there. I am very worried about where the film business is today. I don’t mind that you want to make parts one, two, three and four, but if you look at the list of the recipients of the AFI Award, all of them were trailblazers, all of them were emerging filmmakers. And if this business continues to support emerging filmmakers, the film business is going to go up and up and up. And if you don’t, we’re going to lose it all to television.”

He said that in 1990. And that night nobody paid attention. And it was only nine years later that The Sopranos debuted on HBO and changed the landscape forever.

Now part of what has happened in the 15 years since The Sopranos

Before I worked in television in any serious way, about 15 years ago or so, I hadn’t really thought about it, and then suddenly I was in it and I discovered what fun there was to be had in that. I like details. I like small things, and television is great for that because it can explore the smallest thing over periods of time.

Very often films present a sea change, and in television it isn’t sea changes, it’s small changes that lead to something larger and I like that, I like to see that unfold over a period.

RICHARD PLEPLER, CO-PRESIDENT, HBO, 2012: Ten years ago and even five years ago, there used to be a line that talent didn’t cross—they just did movies and didn’t do anything for the smaller screen.

We are seeing that certainly in movies and in series it’s all about the material. With a good script on HBO, we can have a conversation with anybody, and that is exciting.

LESLIE MOONVES, PRESIDENT & CEO, CBS CORPORATION, 2014: I think the quality of television is at an all-time high—some would argue that the quality of television is where the real power is now, even more than in feature films.

I was fascinated by TV and started watching a lot of it. After we had kids, my wife and I started nesting and watching TV rather than go to the movies. I love shows like Breaking Bad and Shameless, a lot of great character television. Over the past ten years movies have become very corporate. They have to be based on a video game or a spin-off or a franchise and have to check off all the boxes of a four-quadrant movie. It feels like television is where independent film was in the ’90s, and it seemed very exciting to me. It was something different to explore.

KEVIN SPACEY, ACTOR, HOUSE OF CARDS, 2014:

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debuted is that some remarkably brave and courageous programming came first out of HBO and then out of other networks. And the movie business has shifted, really after 1999, 2000, out of character-driven drama into more tentpole, comic-book heroes. If you are an artist, or a filmmaker, or a storyteller, where are you going to go? You are going to where the ground is very fertile, and that is television. So it makes complete sense to me that the best writers, directors, actors, producers have moved on to television, because it’s very hard to get films made, certainly out of the studios. It doesn’t mean that the independent film world isn’t functioning. But it’s very hard to raise money. It’s very hard to get a good release. It’s very hard for these films to make the money back, and that’s why I have been so fortunate as a producer to be able, while this sea change has been happening, to get a number of character-driven dramas on the big screen and have them do very, very well.

Look, is it a trend? My answer is, when character-driven dramas start making money, the studios will start making them again.

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TOP 10 n the last five years since our 25th anniversary, the world of programming has been characterized, if not revolutionized, by a growing number of risk-taking executives who have paved the way for auteur television—shows in which writers and showrunners have been allowed to follow their voices and pursue their visions.

This has given rise to dramas featuring lavish production values; innovative narrative techniques; fantastic and postapocalyptic worlds never before seen in prime time; and lots of complex, flawed characters, often with compromised moral compasses. The audience has reacted more than enthusiastically to this visual smorgasbord of storytelling—watching, bingeing, tweeting, sharing, enjoying. And so have we!

From the numerous interviews we conducted over the past five years with the executives, showrunners and actors we have been granted access to, we have compiled our own Top 10 list of dramas. Of course, our ranking is not an exact science, but we did take into account the shows that created the most buzz, or garnered the highest ratings, or won the most awards. What follows are quotes from the people that brought these shows to life.

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MAD MEN

Mad Men, created by Matthew Weiner, made television history by becoming the first basic-cable series to win the Primetime Emmy for outstanding drama series four years in a row. Paying as much meticulous attention to sets, props and costumes as to the complexities of human nature, this period drama brings to life the inner workings of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and focuses on Don Draper, played

by Jon Hamm, its most successful adman and ladies’ man. The show also transformed AMC from a lesser-known cable channel to a prime destination for quality programming.

MATTHEW WEINER, CREATOR, 2012: The morality of the world [of these characters] is very much like our world. Part of why I am telling the story is because it is really hard to be a person. We are all trying to be moral, and we all have a kind of warped perception of what that is.

Religion of any kind is based on sin and starting over, or having someone else help you start over or having it in your heart to start over. I really believe this—and I hope I am never proved wrong, because it would be shocking—but even people who we perceive clearly to be bad or evil have a reason for what they are doing. They don’t see it as a chance to do evil, they see it as paying people back, or righting a wrong, or evening the score, or controlling someone who has wronged them. I feel that Don [Draper], in particular, is always doing the right thing, that Don is moral, but it’s very situational, and these things conflict with each other. He has a good heart and is trying hard, but he really doesn’t make it a lot of times. He feels bad about it, which helps, and he looks like Jon Hamm, which helps! But he is not really on any abstract scale an ethical or moral person. But he is trying really hard, and there are people who are worse than him. That’s life. Betty Draper is really trying hard to be a good mother and to think of other people, but she is not great at it. She probably shouldn’t have been a mom and gets controlled by her vanity and becomes jealous. All these childish, embarrassing emotions that we want to hide, she has them and she expresses them. Is she a moral person?

No. It’s part of the story of the show, and it’s part of that generation. How are you going to be judged as being moral when you are sent off to kill people by the government? Murder is wrong, but it’s not if you are in a war—well that’s already very confusing, right?

very true to human beings. It’s so much about people trying to do the right thing or trying to make their way, trying to be happy. And their jobs involve selling happiness every day to the public. That against their own struggle for their own personal happiness is very interesting. I don’t consider any of the characters bad

The show that placed AMC on the map as a cable network to be reckoned with, Mad Men is often ranked as one of the greatest drama series in the history of TV. JON HAMM, DON DRAPER, 2011: No one on our show is evil. [Bert] Cooper, I think, has the most Zen approach to it.

Being this sort of elder statesman of the group, he has the best perspective on things. But also he has his own flaws and issues. So, again, it’s a story about people trying to do the best they can with what they have, which is, in many ways, the American dream. Using what you have to get what you want. But it’s the wonderful irony of the whole thing—these are people whose job is to define and sell happiness. And the fact that they are, for the most part, unclear as to their own happiness is the beautiful irony. That’s what I love about the show—the fact that it really explores that irony.

ELISABETH MOSS, PEGGY OLSON, 2011: The great thing about the show is that the characters make mistakes and they do bad things. But they’re not bad people, and that’s very true to life. That’s

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people—they do very bad things, and are amoral—but that comes from being an actor, and you tend to like your character, and you’re not supposed to judge it. But I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for all these characters. And that’s a testament to the writing, and also to the acting—to people like Jon [Hamm] and [John] Slattery and Christina [Hendricks] and January [Jones], who bring that complexity and those multiple levels [to the characters they are playing] that says not just, this is a bad person, but also this is a good person, which is very true to life.

WEINER, 2012: Anyone who knows me knows this: Mad Men could not be more successful as far as I’m concerned. The idea that I got to make an episode after the pilot already exceeded my expectations! I’m not being modest. I just never expected that to happen. The other thing that anyone who knows me will tell you is that I live under pressure all the time. I am afraid of

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failing. I want the audience to like the show, and at the same time I want to challenge them. I want to do what I like.

No one should live by that. If you are just pleasing yourself you are basically making something bad—[a show] is an expression, there is an interaction.

I live under a lot of pressure all the time. Once in a while it will hit me— what the show means to people—and that is the pressure I feel. The more people that have this emotional interaction with it, the more I really don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t want them to suddenly point to it and say, “That was crap,” or, “I don’t like it anymore,” or, “Why did you do that?” But they don’t always know what they like, and the verbal expression of their response is not what is going on in their heart, because the truth is they keep watching it because they want to know what happens. So I feel the pressure to satisfy them. I’m accepting the fact now that with the fifth season we are becoming an older show and there is more of it behind us than there is ahead of us. I am prepared for the world to take an interest in other things as we become an older show. Novelty is always important, but the real pressure, I feel, is just the pressure I’ve always felt of, Oh God, don’t be bad, don’t be boring, don’t repeat yourself—that would

be most disappointing. If people think that we are doing the same thing we’ve always done, that would be very upsetting to me. I try very hard not to do that, and it’s really the hardest part of my job.

JOSH SAPAN, PRESIDENT & CEO, AMC NETWORKS, 2011: If there are imperatives in the world of television, they are normally found in the world of sports and great events. But there are certain dramas or TV shows that move into the spectrum of imperative—they are must-have shows. Mad Men is a must-have because of its cultural resonance and watercooler effect.

It has made the channel much more valuable for cable operators, because as they carry it, they become imperative.

That is very good news. Mad Men’s quality also creates an imperative because it has the effect of elevating what people think of television.

On the advertising side, Mad Men has been great for us. It has actually allowed us to increase our advertising presence and be a much better and more valuable vehicle, which has rewarded us in advertising dollars, both in volume and in price. Mad Men, along with the other shows, has really made AMC a truly more potent place to be if you are an advertiser and want to make your

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products move from the shelves or from the showroom. We found that our share and volume of dollars and our diversity of advertisers, because of Mad Men and these [other] shows, have put us in a very different economic position. That is important for us because it has allowed us to fund and fuel our increase in original programming.

WEINER, 2015: I feel so lucky that we got to do something so peculiar. I think that it will be a business model in some ways, as every small basic-cable channel goes into original programming, that you can do something and change your business with one show. That I am happy about, but creatively, honestly, having spent the last ten years doing a show about history, it would be insane to predict or guess what the legacy of it is. I hope that it stands out as a piece of originality that was successful. That is a rare moment, and that is something that I would hope it would be known for. It’s very hard to encourage people to be original, because it’s brutal. I feel so grateful that they let us do this weird and unusual show. It really has proven to be unlike anything else. I didn’t know that when we were doing it—it feels like normal TV to me—but now I’m aware of it.

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2

BREAKING BAD

There have been a lot of flawed characters on television since The Sopranos, but Walter White in Breaking Bad gives new meaning to the concept of imperfect individuals behaving in morally objectionable ways for good reasons. He takes his terminal cancer diagnosis as free rein to become a kingpin in the drug trade in order to secure his family’s financial stability after his death. Hailed as one of the best shows ever and winner of multiple awards, Breaking Bad was created by Vince Gilligan and featured Bryan Cranston’s brilliant performance as Walter White.

VINCE GILLIGAN, CREATOR, 2012: I have never tried meth, and I have never tried chemistry! I was thinking more in terms of midlife crisis. I was about to turn 40 years old when I came up with this story. I was starting to think about how my life is probably already more than half over and I haven’t done all the things I wanted to do. That was kind of a negative inspiration, but I suddenly found myself pondering a story about a guy who’s having the worst midlife crisis, or an end-of-life crisis, in the case of Walter White.

I didn’t think a show like this could exist, period! I was gripped by this character, and I loved the idea for this show from the beginning, but I didn’t hold out high hopes that the show would ever exist.

Sony Pictures Television was my initial partner as a studio, and we went together to find a broadcast home for this show. I personally didn’t [think] that we’d find one. I knew that if we were going to find one, it would have to be on cable. We didn’t even bother setting meetings at any of the four major networks. A show like this is just too dark to ever be on a network. If it had gone on to a network it would not remotely resemble the show you see now. It would be bowdlerized. It wouldn’t even be a faint echo of what the show is now.

BRYAN CRANSTON, WALTER WHITE, 2013: About 15 years ago, I was able to land a guest-starring role on an episode of The X-Files that [Gilligan] wrote. He had written a character who was despic able, a horrible person, a real

son of a bitch. And yet he felt that it was necessary to write [the character] that way and still try to elicit sympathy from the people who were watching.

The reason he did that is an insight to his multilayered storytelling.

In this instance in The X-Files, David Duchovny and I are in a car for most of

change it? What if I try to change a character from good to bad? What if we got a character like the guy I wrote in The X-Files, where he does despicable things, yet you still sympathize with him? From that he thought of me, because I had played that guy. After reading the pilot episode of Breaking

In Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan flipped the script on the antihero-seeks-redemption story, chronicling one man’s descent from suburbia to a life of crime. the time. There’s something wrong with my character; he has a brain issue where if the car stops his head will explode. So, Duchovny’s character needs to drive in order to keep my character alive. If Vince wrote my character as a sympathetic nice guy, of course Duchovny’s character and the audience would want to save him. That’s what most people would write. But he wrote me as an asshole, and by doing that, he made the audience feel this split of, God this guy is a jerk, I would just pull over and let him die. He made the audience invest in the story. He put a moral dilemma in the core of his lead character: is this man worth saving simply because he is a human being? That is beautiful! He made his lead character struggle with that.

And yet we learn about the human fiber of David’s character—that he just couldn’t [let the villain die]. That was the genesis of the character of Walter White.

In the history of television it has always been about stasis, things staying the same. And Vince thought, What if I

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Bad I thought, This is brilliant, I have to be a part of this! So I came in [to meet with Vince] and was loaded with all kinds of suggestions and ideas—how much the character should weigh, how he should walk, he should be depressed—and I was passionate about him. All these things made sense to Vince, and we just played tennis with these ideas back and forth and back and forth. By the time I left that first meeting, I really felt that he was going to be my champion to get this role, and he was.

GILLIGAN, 2012: [The pacing of the storytelling] is indeed quite condensed. That felt right to us for a couple of reasons. First of all because the engine that drives the show, or certainly drove it initially, is Walt’s cancer diagnosis. In the pilot, when he is diagnosed, Walt is told that he has 18 months to live; that clock was put on his life. We figured that Walt should do an awful lot of living in a short span of time.

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The other reason is because, as smart as Walt is, typically your master criminals of the world don’t do the outlandish and evil things they do for very long without getting caught. Walt does an awful lot of smart criminality, but you figure eventually the other shoe is going to fall. Law enforcement is going to finally catch wind of who this guy is.

CRANSTON, 2013: When I started the first season I was reading a couple [of episode scripts ahead] here and there. I started to get confused because of the twists and turns that Walter White took. We were shooting episode two, but I had read three, four and five, and then I [had to remember], Wait, I don’t know that yet, not at this point. I had to erase what I knew so that I wouldn’t mis inform what I was acting on that particular episode. It didn’t help me in any way. So I thought, This is such a journey for this character, why don’t I just go for the ride. As opposed to getting on the roller coaster and knowing exactly where the twists and turns were going, I decided to not know, just

like everybody else. It’s been the ride of my life.

ble of great darkness and great evil, and that has become more and more apparent as the seasons have progressed.

GILLIGAN, 2012: Walt has done things that are so dark and reprehensible that it even shocked us writers. That may sound strange, since obviously my writers and I came up with it, but when it’s working really well in the writers’ room, we try not to set limits. On a really good day, when things are clipping along, the characters themselves are telling us the story. In a sense, we’re just stenographers writing it down. That takes you to some very dark places. With a character like Walt, he tells us what it is he needs and what it is he’s capable of doing to get what he needs. We just transcribe it.

Other days the opposite is true, and we come to grief for it. Some days we say to ourselves, We really want this to happen, but then Walt tells us, I don’t want that to happen, I want something else. We try to tell the story as organically as possible. I’ll never try to fit a square peg into a round hole storywise. Having said that, if we let the chips fall where they may, Walt is capa-

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CRANSTON, 2013: [My experience on the show] has altered the landscape of my professional opportunities completely. There would have been no Argo without Breaking Bad. When you go into this profession as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, the only thing you are truly hoping for is not to have someone hand you a job but to give you an opportunity. Opportunity is the only thing you want: “Give me a chance to show you what I can do. Give me a chance to play in this playground.”

Then, you better be able to deliver.

I have been given this opportunity by Vince, and it has been a life-altering experience, professionally, artistically, emotionally, physically—I’ve seen my body transform, with the weight loss and going through the harsh deserts. I look back at some of the scenes that were filmed six years ago and I think, Wow, that guy is different. I don’t even know who that guy is anymore! It’s been so transformative.

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HOUSE OF CARDS

When Netflix decided to venture into original scripted content it did not move timidly. It attracted top featurefilm talent, including Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey, not only as star (he plays Francis “Frank” Underwood) but also as executive producer. It allotted a more-than-generous budget, reported at some $5 million per episode, and it granted the writers complete freedom to follow their vision. The result was House of Cards, which created tremendous buzz, garnered critical acclaim, won Spacey and co-star Robin Wright Golden Globes and attracted legions of addicted fans that assiduously binged on multiple episodes.

TED SARANDOS, CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER, NETFLIX, 2011: We’re trying to give our subscribers what they want, and they like these really highly serialized one-hour dramas— shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Weeds and the first couple seasons of Dexter are doing phenomenal. People really love this connection with content in a way that they can binge and watch multiple episodes in one sitting, and it’s a new behavior that people really enjoy. Someone described to me these one-hour serialized dramas as almost the new literature in America, because you can take a long time to flesh out characters, so it’s much different than watching an episode of a sitcom or even sometimes watching a two-hour movie. So we’re trying to do what our customers want and help them get these great one-hour serialized dramas. The economics for those shows are very challenged: DVD sales have slowed dramatically on box sets, and it’s very difficult to syndicate a serialized show, especially the more serialized, the worse for syndication.

What I saw this past season was we looked at a couple of pilots that ended up on networks, and the networks actually unserialized them before they brought them to air, because they were so worried about this phenomenon.

What I saw was that these shows would not be made for commercial television and that pay television— HBO, Showtime, Starz—is unlikely to want to sell to us, so that if we were going to want to bring this content to our customers, we may have to develop the muscle of doing it with producers instead. We’re excited to jump in the

fray and do a show like House of Cards, which would’ve been a perfect show to go to HBO in the first window, but instead we’ll spend a lot more bringing it to Netflix in the first window. It kind of forced us into a competitive space with them where I don’t think we needed to be, but if it turns

worked together previously as actor and director in Se7en—started throwing around the idea of wanting to work together again. This conversation went on for a little while, maybe a month or so, just poking around with the idea. Then he came to me and said that he had heard that the

Inspired by the BBC trilogy of the same name, House of Cards marked Netflix’s arrival as a major player in the original drama business. out to be successful, then it’ll be an efficient way for us to spend programming dollars.

SARANDOS, 2013: As a company we move pretty quickly, and what I didn’t want to do was create a multiyear test to figure out if original programming was going to be successful on Netflix. I didn’t want to do something small and then if it didn’t work, wonder if it was because it was too small. I thought we had to do something substantial that would send a very loud signal to talent that we really were in this business, and to our subscribers that this was a meaningful differentiator among subscription services.

So we had to make a little bit of noise the first time out.

KEVIN SPACEY, FRANK UNDERWOOD, 2014: I produced a film called The Social Network. It was during the shooting of that film that David Fincher and I—we had

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rights of a British television series that he had never seen called House of Cards were available. I said, Well, I have seen it, and I thought it was really terrific and actor Ian Richardson was brilliant. So he went away to watch it, I went away and watched it again, and we came back together and decided that it would in fact translate very well to a U.S. series. From there we began to develop the idea, and Beau Willimon was brought on. He wrote the first two scripts, and then we went out and pitched it to all of the networks that one would pitch something like this to and ultimately we also pitched it to Netflix.

SARANDOS, 2013: It was very adventurous for House of Cards to make that jump to Netflix, but what they have seen since is that we can build an audience, we can bring attention to the show and make sure that it gets seen and that it gets appreciated, even at the highest levels

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in the form of nine Emmy nominations. When we went into this, we did not have an awards-driven agenda. We didn’t even think that we qualified for Emmy Awards when we first convinced David Fincher or Kevin Spacey to bring House of Cards to Netflix.

SPACEY, 2014: Perhaps your readers won’t know that actually the role of Francis was based on Richard III in the original books by Michael Dobbs [author of the House of Cards trilogy]. That’s why the direct address [Frank speaking directly to the camera] happens. While many people think Ferris Bueller was the first direct address, it was actually William Shakespeare, and in Richard III he created direct address. It’s different from a monologue. In Shakespeare, a monologue is a character expressing his thoughts and sharing them with the whole theater. In direct address you’re looking directly into the eyes of the audience and engaging them individually. To some degree, Frank and Richard III have certain shadows of each other, but obviously Frank is a very different kind of character and obviously in a very modern setting. But both of these works are about the nature of power, the nature of what people will do to retain it and get it.

SARANDOS, 2013: In the case of House of Cards, they are relatively uniform running times, but none of the episodes contain traditional cliff-hangers. We certainly don’t have the commercial-break cliff-hangers either. So it really gives storytellers the freedom to tell their stories without worrying whether or not the audience remembers what they watched last week. That also frees up 10 or 15 percent of the show’s running time to create much richer characters and denser plotlines. Those cliff-hangers trick you into coming back after each commercial or after each episode. When you strip all of those out of each episode, you find it creates a very different rhythm to the show.

SPACEY, 2014: There is definitely [creative] freedom, because we weren’t asked to do a pilot.

We didn’t want to do a pilot, because a pilot is quite often just an audition in which you have to establish all the characters in 45 minutes. You have to come up with arbitrary cliff-hangers, you have to mechanically do things. What we were given was a very long runway and an ability to allow for characters that would develop over time and give them space. That’s the kind of freedom

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we had. For me this has never felt like I am doing a television series. I don’t think of it episodically. I think of it as if we’re telling you a very long story. It’s a little bit like making a very long film.

When friends tell me, Oh, I loved episode so and so, I literally have no idea what episode they are talking about! Because I don’t think of them as episodes, we think of them as chapters.

I suppose with respect to the way we work, the platform really doesn’t have anything to do with our creative process. Yes, we are fortunate that we don’t have commercial breaks, but then again, our audience can decide when they want to break. It’s the same way that you treat a novel: you decide when you want to put it down on your bedside, you decide when you want to pick it up. It’s very much the same thing that is happening with how people are consuming and how people have consumed since the Gutenberg press. We didn’t invent this way of viewing; it’s been going on since box sets [of DVDs]. The difference has been that the audience likes being in control, and the Netflix model has proved that they like making these decisions for themselves. I would say that I think appointment viewing is more behind us than ahead of us.

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DOWNTON ABBEY

That Downton Abbey, the period drama that chronicles the trials and tribulations of the aristocratic Crawley family and the servants who work for them, would capture a loyal audience among British viewers was no surprise. But that this lavishly produced series, which illustrates the impact of historical events and changing social mores on the manor’s upstairs and downstairs residents, would become a worldwide hit and garner critical acclaim certainly took its creator, Julian Fellowes, and executive producer Gareth Neame by surprise. The show has won Primetime Emmys, Golden Globes and BAFTAs, among other awards, becoming the most successful British costume drama since Brideshead Revisited in 1981.

GARETH NEAME, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, 2010: Julian Fellowes and I were working on another script that wasn’t really getting any traction, and we were having dinner one night doing a debrief on that other project, and I said, “You know, what we should really work on together is a return to a territory similar to what you already covered in Gosford Park and do it as an episodic series.” My thinking was to do something contemporary in feel that would really allow him to explore all the characters, as you can do in a series, with his unique knowledge of that world. I thought we could combine the elements of a wellresearched period drama with a really commercial mainstream series. Julian came back to me a few weeks later and said he wanted to give it a go.

JULIAN FELLOWES, CREATOR, 2014: Downton is a very tight team. Gareth Neame, Elizabeth Trubridge and I make the show. We work very, very closely together. For the major casting, even the minor casting, we weigh in. I finish a script and my wife, Emma, reads it. I do her notes. Then Gareth and Liz read it, and they have big notes and I do one big note session. Then they have little notes, you know, he’s using a glass, wouldn’t it be better if he had a cup? Then I do those. Only then does it go to ITV. And then if they have useful things to say we do them, but basically by the time Emma and the three of us have finished with the scripts, it’s getting very near to what will be shot.

NEAME, 2010: There are really only two options in the market for this sort of project, BBC One and ITV1. I wanted the show to have the sort of broad impact that it eventually did have, and that’s a different level to

place. That is why dramas about police departments and hospitals always go on, because you can have all these different backgrounds and different age groups and different conditioning all in one place believably. I suppose that the class

Bringing soap-opera sensibilities to the vaunted tradition of British period drama, Downton Abbey has become a massive global hit. what one can achieve on BBC One. Of course, I had no way of knowing how successful that show would be, that it would become part of the national conversation, but I had a sense that being on BBC would be a lot more predictable. It would be sort of “the son of Cranford.”

[Cranford was a very successful high-end BBC costume drama.] I didn’t want it to be part of a tradition and a portfolio of things. I wanted it to stand out. I also liked the idea of it going on ITV at nine o’clock after a great night of general entertainment [Downton Abbey was scheduled after The X Factor]. I didn’t see any reason why the show should not be on ITV. It’s nice to hear people say that the show has helped to enhance the image of ITV, but I don’t subscribe to that view. I think ITV has consistently made fine dramas.

But I do recognize that the show has made more impact by being on ITV.

FELLOWES, 2012: In a drama you want to have a great variety of people who are believably in one

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system is another version of that. You have all these people under one roof, and yet they all have completely different expectations of life and different ambitions, maybe, or maybe not, and different chances of realizing them. But I suppose the conditioning of class where—not so much now, but in the old days—you were expected to define yourself and your hopes and dreams along class lines, seems so extraordinary to our generation. It is rather interesting that so many men and women lived within those kinds of confines.

FELLOWES, 2014: One thing that I always try to do, and it’s a theme of the show, is that we have as much respect for Daisy [a maid] dealing with her issues as we do for Edith [the Earl’s daughter] dealing with hers. We’re all dealt a set of cards in this life. Some hands are rather better than others admittedly, but in the end we have to play them as best we can. I don’t mean people who are really at the bottom and

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are having an absolutely ghastly time all the time; I exclude them from this. But from the working class and the middle class and the upper class we have examples of people who have made a success of things and people who have made a great mess of things—you can find them up and down the social ladder.

NEAME, 2010: The principle reason [for the show’s success] is that it follows a soap narrative.

Julian has 18 principle characters, all with meaningful action in each episode, all with a journey to follow. That makes it fulfilling for the actors and rewarding for the audience. It’s a sort of posh soap, which has never really been done before. It follows the same narrative rules of complex, intertwined personal relationships. I did not want it to feel like a historical show. I wanted the mechanics to feel like a contemporary show.

Julian’s writing is very economical in a contemporary way. You come into scenes later and leave earlier and take great leaps in the narrative. It isn’t a costume drama. A costume drama is usually based on a Victorian novel, where a writer has adapted Jane Austen or Charles Dickens and the underlying novel narrative must be adhered to and translated for a television audience. That is a completely different job from creat-

ing an original TV show that happens to be set 100 years ago.

FELLOWES, 2012: American television reinvented the concept of the drama series a few years ago with this layered, multistory, multinarrative, very fast-paced movement.

One thing we perhaps did do right with Downton is that although in one way it is a traditional period series, the kind British television was making 30 years ago—and some of them were marvelous—when you look at those shows, they are generally single narrative and, to our rhythm, quite slow. Instead of going back into that territory, we really modeled Downton more on a modern American show in the sense of having lots going on and getting involved with all sorts of characters simultaneously. In the old days, when you were watching one of those shows, you could go out and make a cup of tea, whereas now, if you are watching ER, you can’t go and make a cup of tea, unless you have a television in the kitchen, because you come back and you’ve missed the whole end of one story! That was the pattern we were looking at rather than traditional British television.

The world at the moment is slightly unsure of itself. Our economy has gone AWOL, and we don’t know what we are

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doing. I don’t think this is the end of anything. I just think we are moving from this period into the next. While you are going through a period of transition, that can increase the sense of insecurity and it’s tempting to look at periods that appear to be more settled, when people were more secure in their own selfworth. Of course, if you were living in 1890 or 1920 or 1960—well, I was living in 1960—there was as much insecurity in people as there is today. But looked at from the outside, from a later period in time, people had more rules to hold on to. There was more of a shared knowledge of what you were supposed to be doing, of what you were supposed to be wearing, of what you were supposed to be saying. All of that gave society a kind of a framework to hold on to, and we have chosen to abolish our framework.

We’ve moved into an era of “casual chic,” whatever that means, and we don’t have the rules that our forebears had. Of course, the other side of that is that we also have far more freedom.

Whether or not we would want to go back into a world of rigid rules is quite a different matter, but television can give you the security of the rules without the difficulty in sustaining them. We enjoy a world where everyone knows what’s what but we don’t have to get up at four in the morning to go clean the grate!

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THE WALKING DEAD

The Walking Dead has shattered all ratings records for a basic-cable show. Starting with the 5.4 million viewers who tuned in to the premiere on AMC in October 2010 to check out the postapocalyptic zombie drama based on the comic books by Robert Kirkman, the audience just grew and grew. Over the course of five seasons, the show has reached upwards of 17 million viewers. The series also broke a longstanding television taboo; it routinely kills off main characters. Kirkman manages a delicate balance between the stories in his comic books and those in the series and guides the cast, including star Andrew Lincoln, through a constant turnover of characters.

ROBERT KIRKMAN, CREATOR, 2014: Some of the writers are a little bit more immersed in the comics than even I am, which is at times very embarrassing.

There’s been more than one occasion where they’ll say, “I really want to adapt that scene where so-and-so says this thing.” I don’t remember specific things people said! That’s always a fun treat.

But we sit down and look at the original comic-book stories, and then we do our work in the television writers’ room. We look at the different characters we have.

We look at how the characters that exist in the show that don’t exist in the comic would affect and change stories we want to adapt from the comics. As we get into the work of doing that, new story lines start to arise, and every now and then one of them leads to a fairly unexpected death. That’s how you get characters like Andrea, who die earlier in the show than they do in the comic book. It’s all just a group of writers working to craft the best story. Sometimes that follows the source material, sometimes it doesn’t, which I support 100 percent. If we were adapting the comic book directly, I would be bored. Despite the fact that sometimes I don’t remember all the ins and outs of a story, I do know that I’ve already written it before. So I wouldn’t want to write it a second time.

GALE ANNE HURD, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, 2012: Well, the interesting thing is that Robert Kirkman’s underlying comic book, The Walking Dead, is also a huge success.

The fans care very deeply about it. The 100th issue is now the best-selling comic

book in 15 years, outselling Marvel and DC. Over 350,000 comic books were sold. It would be very difficult [to decide] what to change if it were not for the fact that Robert Kirkman is not only an executive producer of the show, but he’s in

and saying to them, Where do you think Rick’s breaking point is? And they wrote it. Losing his wife [Lori, played by Sarah Wayne Callies] has seriously pushed him into a place that he’s never been before.

A global phenomenon, The Walking Dead has legions of ultra-devoted fans, dominates social media when it airs and routinely breaks ratings records for cable TV. the writers’ room, part of that discussion about what to keep, what to change and what to invent. And with his blessing, I think that the fans accept those changes.

ANDREW LINCOLN, RICK GRIMES, 2013: It was always the intention of Robert Kirkman, Frank [Darabont, showrunner of season one], Gale [Anne Hurd] and AMC to have this extraordinary world with ordinary people in it and [explore] how this world changes them. In the space of three seasons, Rick has been on this tumultuous journey. He begins as a man awakening into this new world and discovering it. He is the eyes and the ears of the audience—you discover this new hell along with him. Being reunited with his family gave him a stronger impetus to survive. And then season two was about a man struggling for his ideology. Can you retain your humanity in this new world? Or will pragmatism win the day? With season three…I made the fatal error of going into the writers’ room

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FRANK DARABONT, SEASON ONE SHOWRUNNER, 2011: I’ve always loved the zombie genre and have long wondered how I could approach it in a fresh way that hadn’t been done before. Many self-contained films have been made, many excellent ones, so I never saw the reason to try that. Then I read Kirkman’s comic, and I thought, Here’s the different way to do it: as an extended character-driven saga for television, a serialized take on the zombie apocalypse seen through the eyes of an ongoing group of characters. That, to me, felt like the fresh approach that hadn’t been done before.

The biggest difference I’ve found between adapting for film versus adapting for television is that with television you have a far greater period of time to explore the story and characters; you’re not trying to squeeze everything into the two-hour running time of a film. A TV series can be a creative luxury in that sense: you can let the story and characters expand and breathe because you have a far greater span

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of time to tell the tale. But that does involve a shift in thinking when it comes to adapting material: you have to resist the urge to say everything all at once, as you would in a film. For television, you stretch the story out rather than compress it, hopefully in a way that keeps the audience intrigued rather than making them impatient.

KIRKMAN, 2014: [Losing actors] is always hard. There are traditions—we have a big death dinner where everyone goes out and celebrates the actor that we’re losing. Those traditions help people a little bit. I think everyone knows that it’s around the corner for [them as well]; to a certain extent, it’s a matter of time. People do sign on to the show now thinking, Am I going to be around for a season? Two seasons? Three seasons? Everyone knows that this is a show that portrays a very dangerous world where anyone can go at any minute. In order to honor that, we have to lose characters from time to time.

It’s certainly an emotional thing for me coming from the comics. Telling these stories in comic-book form, it’s just artist Charlie Adlard and me deciding not to write and draw an imaginary character.

The show is different. [The cast members] are very close on set in Georgia. They all get together on weekends, and their kids get to know each other. They’ve become a big family, so it is an emotional thing when we lose a character. But we have to do it for the sake of the show.

While a death irrecoverably changes the group dynamic, other characters come forward. New characters, new blood, new ideas, they keep regenerating the show. I hope that will be the enduring strength of the series.

Sarah Wayne Callies is a consummate professional, and she’s been the greatest leading lady. We e-mail one another as TV Husband and TV Wife, TVH and TVW, and now it’s DTVW. She is a phenomenal actress, but she also has that incredible emotional intelligence, which I think is probably why a lot of women are watching the show. That is a remarkable achievement for this genre. But then, it was never pitched to me as a genre show. It was pitched as a character-driven show.

HURD, 2012: AMC is very bold. They roll the dice on their programming, on things that other networks haven’t done before. The same is true for FOX International [Channels, a global partner on the show]. People were wondering, given the dark and graphic nature of the comic book, would it transition into a television series successfully? And the truth is that if it hadn’t been for the support of AMC and FOX International, if we had done a watered-down version, I don’t think it would have been the success that it is. We’ve never once gotten a note to tone it down.

LINCOLN, 2013:

KIRKMAN, 2014:

It’s very hard. It’s the one downside to this glorious job. We’ve become [very close] by virtue of the subject matter, how we work, where we work—it’s our own little bubble in the South, in Senoia, away from lots of cell phones; they don’t work there, everybody just has to learn their lines and fight zombies! It’s a unique experience. The crew is magnificent. And everybody fights for each other and works for each other. It really is the greatest family I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. So when we lose a family member, we have a death dinner. And no one stops being in the Walking Dead family. It’s a very moving thing. Everyone knows when we’re wrapping seasons, and you get e-mails from [former cast members] wishing love and luck and congratulations to the crew and cast. The beauty of it is it’s almost like we’re a moving target—the show keeps changing, it keeps evolving. It’s not like a procedural drama. It keeps moving forward.

Creatively, you do projects for yourself.

When I’m writing The Walking Dead, I’m trying to do things I would find the most entertaining. You can’t go, Are audiences in Argentina, Spain, Germany and the U.S. going to respond to this in the same way or a different way?

You’d never get anything done if you tried to take all that stuff into consideration. Really, it’s just, Hey, do I think this is neat? And then in the back of your head you’re thinking, Man, I hope other people think this is neat. That’s all you can do. Everything else after that is in the capable hands of FIC and their marketing team and the people at AMC and everyone else trying to make people aware of the show that you’ve done. From the outset, you’re really just doing it for yourself.

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HOMELAND

Homeland premiered shortly after the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and immediately struck several chords with viewers. It served up complex issues like terrorism, patriotism and how far an individual will go to right a wrong. The series, loosely based on the Israeli drama Hatufim (Prisoners of War), featured a damaged and possibly turned ex-POW; a bipolar CIA operative, played by Claire Danes; and totally absorbing storytelling from showrunners Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa that wasn’t always easy to watch. But the gripping award-winning drama kept viewers coming back for more.

GIDEON RAFF, CREATOR, PRISONERS OF WAR, 2013: I met with Avi Nir, the CEO of Keshet, who wanted to collaborate with me, and I really wanted to collaborate with him. He told me, “Send me an idea.” I said I’d been working on something.

And he goes, “I hope it’s a sitcom.” And I said, “It’s not really!” [Laughs] I sent him three pages describing Hatufim.

He took them with him [on the flight back to Israel], and when he landed he called and said, “Start writing.” Avi Nir pitched it to Rick Rosen at WME and Rick said, I love this idea and I have the perfect partners for you. I translated the pilot episode into English and sent it to Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa.

They read it, they loved it and they asked me to translate the rest of the series, and I did. It took me about five days to translate the whole thing. I was so excited that Howard and Alex were into it that I just didn’t sleep! [Laughs] Then we started meeting in Los Angeles and discussing the differences between our cultures and how to best adapt this story to America. I told them, I wrote this show during the Iraq War and during the war in Afghanistan and I never saw pictures of coffins on the news.

American prisoners of war were never discussed on a national level. Most of my educated, savvy, political friends here in America don’t know that there’s an American prisoner of war right now with the Taliban who has been there for almost three years. In Israel, [prisoners of war are] a huge issue.

Israel negotiates for their prisoners of war, so [the prisoners in the Israeli series] came back after a long negotiation. The U.S. does not negotiate

with terrorists, and that’s why Brody [Homeland’s returned POW] was released in a military operation. The focus of Homeland is very much on the interrogation; it’s very much on the thriller. In the Israeli show, the family drama is just as important as the secrets they are hiding.

HOWARD GORDON, SHOWRUNNER, 2012: What Alex and I appreciated, particularly with regard to this series, was what I’d call the rhythm, just the fact that we didn’t have to be interrupted by commercials.

This show required what we hoped was a trancelike involvement or a spell—not to

Said to be President Obama’s favorite show, Homeland has earned lots and lots of awards, and fans, for its deft portrayal of antiterrorism activities in post-9/11 America.

DAVID NEVINS, PRESIDENT OF ENTERTAINMENT, SHOWTIME NETWORKS, 2013: Homeland was originally developed partly with a mind toward broadcast television, so it was both about moving quickly and also about reimagining what the show could be in a pay-cable environment. That entailed making the characters a lot more ambiguous: making the good guys in the script less good and the bad guys less evil. And then moving very quickly in convincing Twentieth Century Fox [which would produce the show] why it was worth their while to come to Showtime. And convincing the producers why it was worth their while to come to Showtime and also showing that we had a good broadcast plan for their show. I knew exactly where I was going to put it, and from the very beginning I told them that the show would air in the fall of 2011, playing with Dexter on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. That was influential for them when they had choices of where to take it.

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sound pretentious but for lack of a better word—and we knew commercials would disrupt that flow. So not having to write to those artificial breaks was very liberating, and I think was part of the show’s success. Aside from the fact that on a broadcast network show, you probably couldn’t have a heroine who is bipolar.

ALEX GANSA, SHOWRUNNER, 2012: We definitely had Claire [Danes] in mind.

The minute we actually began to speak of a female intelligence officer, she was the first actor that was in our minds.

Temple Grandin had just aired [on HBO], and her performance in that film is just extraordinary. We thought that we were going to have a very complex, interesting character at the heart of this piece and Claire could be perfect to play it. She was also just the perfect age. There was a lot of discussion when we were casting this role about how old this woman should be, and Showtime had a history of casting slightly older ladies than Claire

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in their shows, and they were sort of pushing us in that direction, in more of the Robin Wright age range. We thought that our character should be younger than that, especially because she was so troubled and complex. You feel that the younger she is, the more hope there is that she could get over [her condition].

CLAIRE DANES, CARRIE MATHISON, 2013: The pilot was immediately gripping. It was obviously a piece of excellent writing, which one doesn’t come across very often. I was intimidated by it. It was ambitious, and this character was and still is incredibly dynamic and complex and a little difficult. When I get just a little bit afraid, I think, Gosh, OK, fine, I think I have to do it! The pilot was terribly engaging, and I wanted to read the next episode. I believed that other people would feel the same way.

It was a very interesting little syllabus I put together for myself before the first season. I did delve into both of those subjects [CIA and psychology], and found them to be incredibly riveting. I have to tune up every so often; I have to go to that material and remember what I had studied so intensely before we started. But I kind of get it now. It was about seeing her through all these various adventures with as much integrity as possible. These are both subjects that happen to naturally appeal to me. I am interested in psychology. And the world of espionage is totally fascinating, and not entirely unrelated to the world of theater. It’s about role-playing and being intensely perceptive.

GANSA, 2014: Homeland is unlike a lot of shows. We have a very open-door policy. We will take good ideas and encourage good ideas to come from anywhere. I always tell the story about Patti Podesta, who was the production designer on the pilot. We were scouting locations. There is one scene in the pilot in which Carrie is in a bar and she is picking up some guy and she is listening to a jazz band and watches the fret work of a bass player and realizes, Oh my gosh, Brody was communicating with someone when he was on television by using a tapping code [with his fingers].

The version of that scene when we were scouting the location of that bar was that Carrie was on her way out of the bar and passed a booth where a bunch of deaf college students were signing at each other.

There is a very famous university for the

deaf in D.C. called Gallaudet, and these students were signing at each other and when she saw them using sign language, that’s what gave her the idea that Brody was using a tapping code to communicate in front of the cameras. So we were all at this bar, scouting this location and there happened to be a jazz band playing, and Patti Podesta looks at me and says, “Alex, look at the bass player.” And I look at the bass player and she says, “Wouldn’t that be better than the deaf kids?” And from that conversation, obviously the scene changed. But not only that; Carrie’s love of jazz came out of that location scout. And the production designer, whose last job it is to talk about stories, came up with this idea and we said, That is so much better. There’s an example of the production designer, but believe me,

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Showtime has had a number of fantastic ideas, and the first and foremost one of them is they pushed us to make Carrie more of an extreme character than she was when we first wrote the script.

Although they didn’t suggest specifically the idea that Carrie was bipolar, they said, “Look, we need something more, what else can you add to that character?

She’s not just a maverick; she’s not just a pariah in the CIA. Is there something else we can add to that character that makes her more alive and more interesting?” So Howard and I went away and thought about it for a while, and we came back with this idea that she had this bipolar illness, which, again, informed the series on such a deep level, and it was a direct result of Showtime pushing us to be something more.

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BROADCHURCH

In a television landscape replete with antiheroes of all stripes, zombies and medieval fantasy creatures, it was a bit surprising that a classic whodunit, shot more as a documentary than a TV series, set in a sleepy coastal town, featuring ordinary yet damaged people, would captivate British viewers for eight weeks, becoming one of the highest-rated series of 2013 in the U.K. Broadchurch, about the murder of an 11-year-old boy, was created by Chris Chibnall and stars David Tennant as Detective Inspector Alec Hardy. It garnered such high critical acclaim that FOX in the U.S. commissioned its own version called Gracepoint, also starring Tennant.

CHRIS CHIBNALL, CREATOR, 2014: It was a long-gestating idea in my head. I had always wanted to do a really big ensemble drama. I’m a really big fan of murder mysteries. I’ve been living in Dorset for seven or eight years, where the show is shot. I live a mile from that beach. It’s so beautiful. I had been thinking somebody should really film something here, and then I thought, Oh my God, I’m capable of writing something that can be set here! Actually, there is no greater community than a small town, like the small town where I live. It’s a beautiful cinematic landscape, and I really fancied doing a good old-fashioned murder-mystery whodunit in the Agatha Christie tradition.

But there were also two American shows that were a big influence on me in my twenties and have stayed with me ever since. You can see them in Broadchurch—they are Twin Peaks and Murder One, the Steven Bochco show that is one legal trial over 23 episodes.

All that stuff was in a creative cocktail shaker and out comes Broadchurch!

DAVID TENNANT, ALEC HARDY, 2014: I had previously worked with Chris Chibnall on both Doctor Who and on his TV movie United, about the Manchester United Munich air disaster. So I knew Chris well, I knew his work well, and I knew that it would be a script worth reading. James Strong is a director I’ve worked with many times, again on Doctor Who and on United. So the fact that it was them approaching me meant that I was all the more inclined to be part of it. And then I read [the script] and thought, This is fantastic—a brilliantly

drawn portrait of a terrible event with these extraordinary characters, all of whom you need to know more about.

The whole world of it was so evocative.

At the end of episode one you are desperate to know what happens next. All those things collided to make me think, This is something to be part of.

was doing that a long time ago in sci-fi with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What people want are real emotions.

TENNANT, 2014: It seemed to catch a moment. It took all of us by surprise. Whenever you make something, you hope it’s going to be

In the spring of 2013, the tale of the murder of a young boy in a sleepy seaside town was a national obsession in the U.K., becoming one of ITV’s highest-rated dramas ever.

CHIBNALL, 2014: I’m writing as production is going along.

On the first season we were greenlit into a particular slot, so it was quite a fast turnaround. I was writing as we went along. With the schedule for the second season, it’s a bit the same. But I like the active process of calibrating the show as you’re watching dailies. You end up tailoring characters to performances. It’s a really inspiring thing if you can keep finessing the show as it’s shooting.

Because what you write is different from what ends up on the screen. You have to enjoy and use what ends up onscreen and feed that back into the writing. That’s where the great symbiosis is.

What you want are stories to help you make sense of your life. What I was interested in in Broadchurch was to say, If this really happened, how would it feel for all the people involved? How would they respond emotionally? It was really taking that genre structure of the story and then applying emotional truth to it.

But that’s not a new thing. Joss Whedon

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well received and enthused over, that people will hopefully think it’s as good as you do. But that kind of thing, when it takes on a life of its own, when it becomes a national talking point, I don’t think any one of us was quite prepared for that. It’s wonderful to be in the center of something like that, but quite overwhelming! [Laughs] During the run-up to that final episode, people were going crazy about what was coming. It was fantastic to be part of a national conversation.

CHIBNALL, 2014: I wrote one very early draft for myself, because I wrote it on spec, it wasn’t a commission. I wrote that first draft and then, I can’t remember if it was a few days or a few weeks later, I woke up one morning, literally doing that thing that people only ever do in movies of sitting bolt upright and saying, Oh my God! I had an idea! My subconscious kind of solved it! It worked its way out of my

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system and onto paper. It just suggested it to me, and from that moment on I thought, Well, it can’t be any other person because it made sense of what I wanted the show to be about. That was way before we started shooting, so I knew from very early on.

TENNANT, 2014: We found out [about plot developments] as the scripts came out to us. I had no idea, for instance, who the killer was until I got the script for episode eight. I had my own suspicions and my own theories, but I was as in the dark as Alec Hardy was. I was genuinely investigating each character as I came across them. And I had no sense of who was lying to me and who wasn’t. That was quite useful as an acting exercise.

CHIBNALL, 2014: I was heavily involved in setting [Gracepoint] up. I wrote the pilot episode, and I spent time with Anya [Epstein] and Danny [Futterman]. We chose them as

showrunners because they are terrific writers and producers. I was there throughout that initial process, helping it all come together. Then they took the ball and ran with it. It was a really nice experience. I’m proud of what they’ve done…. We talked and we started from a very similar place, and Gracepoint soon became its own thing. What I wanted to do was protect the tone and pace and emotional language and visual language of the show, which is very different from a lot of other television shows. We wanted to have all that in place and then allow Gracepoint to grow into its own show. You set up the parameters and say, This is what I think is important about the show, and now, within those parameters, make your own thing. That sort of collaboration is really interesting.

As soon as you bring in a new cast and go to a different landscape, everything becomes fresh anyway. For all the success of Broadchurch for us in the U.K., in America it had a very small audience. It’s not that well known a show publicly, so it presents a great

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opportunity to do an American version that can speak to the audience there. In addition, there are two extra episodes in Gracepoint. It happens quite organically. It has a movement away from the original; it’s a really nice thing to behold.

TENNANT, 2014: I’ve had a few close calls with various American television projects that, for various reasons, hadn’t quite come to fruition. There was something very appealing about the fact that this was something I knew was good. It was going to be executive produced by people I knew and trusted. It was going straight to series, which of course is quite rare. It felt like there were too many positives to look a gift horse in the mouth. It was an unusual situation, trying to re-create something I had done in a whole new set of circumstances, but that felt like it might be an interesting challenge.

There were so many positives to the project that it would have been churlish to say no.

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8

SCANDAL

Scandal premiered on ABC in the spring of 2012 to not exactly stellar ratings. But it immediately drew an extremely loyal audience. Viewers quickly took to social media to share their enthusiasm for the series about a Washington, D.C. crisis-management expert named Olivia Pope, who cleans up the messes and outrageous problems created by the powers that be, including the President. By its second season, Scandal was one of the highest-rated shows on network television, with a passionate Twitter following that was drawing more viewers to live television. Scandal was created by Shonda Rhimes and stars Kerry Washington.

KERRY WASHINGTON, OLIVIA POPE, 2014: I got a call from my agents. They had read the script, and they really loved it. They said, “There is this script we want you to read. It’s almost as if Shonda wrote it for you.” Of course she hadn’t. At the time, Shonda and I didn’t know each other at all. But I read it, and I too just felt, Oh my God, this role is amazing. It’s me in some ways, and in the ways it’s not me, these are things I want to explore as an actor. I just really, really, really wanted to be a part of it, as did lots of other actresses!

I spend a lot of time with Judy Smith, who is the inspiration for the character Olivia Pope. She’s a real-life crisismanagement expert who works out of Washington but is also in New York and L.A. I spent a lot of time with her, shadowed her and tried to absorb as much as I could about her world.

She does a lot of consulting with the scripts. A lot of times the writers will come up with the most scandalous situations they can think of, and then they call Judy and ask, “What would you do?” It’s not that she pitches ideas based on her previous clients, because she’s not allowed to do that, obviously. And even with me, often she will explain a story or a situation, but she’ll never attach a name. But she is very helpful in getting us to understand the process of crisis management.

SHONDA RHIMES, CREATOR, 2014: We have a lot of fun on that show coming up with those moments. There is magic to the way that room works, to the phenomenon of the energy of all the writers in there together. We’re all excited about politics. We’re all excited about conspiracies. We’re all excited about red

wine! But also we all like telling stories in a fast-paced way. We all have the same level of impatience. We all have encyclopedic knowledge of television shows and say to one another, “That bores me, I’ve seen that before,” or, “We’re moving too slowly and things have to go faster.” So it’s a really collaborative, exciting effort.

PAUL LEE, PRESIDENT, ABC ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, 2013: If we believe in a show, even if it starts out a little bit weaker, and we believe it’s got long-term value in terms of its creativity, and we believe in the cast and the showrunners, then we will

In the on-demand era, Scandal has demonstrated that there are some shows that viewers still want to watch live—and talk about, in real time, on Twitter.

WASHINGTON, 2014: I always say [to the writers], I don’t know what drugs you guys are on, but stay on them! I think the writers are just very bold, and they’re not holding back. They are having a good time, and we get to therefore have a great time because of it.

We have this really talented ensemble of actors, and everybody’s toolbox is very different—how they approach the work and how they live in the work. One of the great joys for me, because I get to work with most of the characters, is that I get to be privy to everybody’s differing processes and watch how different people work, how they approach the work, how they get to where they need to be.

It’s really fun. I feel like I’m always learning from how each actor approaches the material. It’s fascinating. The one thing I’ll say is that it’s like being part of an amazing theater troupe. We are always pushing each other and supporting each other to do better and be more and more courageous in the work.

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stick by it. Scandal had an OK launch last year. Now it is a big hit for us because it’s really found its feet. Kerry Washington is superb, and Shonda Rhimes is knocking it out of the park.

We gave Scandal time to find itself and find an audience, and now it really has.

Social media is absolutely critical to the entire conversation and buzz that surround a show. We do what we call “viral storming” when we launch a show. We’ll not only pre-sample it, we’ll have a huge amount of activity with the showrunners and stars on Facebook pages, on Twitter, on every single platform. The truth is, with a great show it gains a life of its own. If you look at a show like Scandal, I think it is the number one highest social metric show on broadcast television. We did a spectacular job of listening to, reaching out to and connecting with our audience on Scandal, and that audience is now so passionate and so vocal about what they think of the show. And by the way, Shonda

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has a fantastic Twitter feed—that helps. The show has gained a life of its own, and honestly, it’s impossible to imagine what it was like before social media.

WASHINGTON, 2014: In some ways we owe the show to our fans’ enthusiasm—they loved this show into a second season, and a lot of it had to do with a grassroot social-media following.

RHIMES, 2014: That was an amazing phenomenon in terms of the power of Twitter and the power of the voice of an audience, which I think is fantastic. Kerry Washington came to me early on and said, I think all of us should be on Twitter. I was on Twitter and she was on Twitter, and we both loved it. She thought the entire cast should be on Twitter, but Kerry is very smart, she thought [the suggestion should come from me]. So I went to everybody and said, “We should all get on Twitter,” and the entire cast—they are very game and they are very excited and very enthusiastic—got on Twitter. They discovered that they all love the experience of live tweeting and the conversation that went with live

tweeting. They embraced what that meant, and that was great for us.

The audience went along with it, which was fantastic. To have people discover the show because their friends were talking about it on Twitter really changed the game in terms of how television was talked about and viewed. It changed what watercooler conversation was, and it also changed the idea that you want to be watching the show live now because you want to be having a conversation on Twitter, you don’t want to miss what is happening there.

WASHINGTON, 2014: There has been so much talk about the historic nature of Scandal and how there hasn’t been a woman of color leading a network drama in almost 40 years. Obviously, if you look at the state of Hollywood right now, that’s not because of a lack of talent, it’s because of a lack of opportunities. So I really thank ABC and ABC Studios and the Disney/ABC family for the opportunity of giving this show a chance. Anne Sweeney [former co-chair, Disney Media Networks, and president, Disney/ABC Television Group] and Paul Lee and Bob Iger [chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company] taking a

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“risk” on this show is so powerful and so important.

And a lot of that has to do with the creative currency that Shonda has built up at the network—having successes like Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice really created a landscape where she could take these swings and call the shots. It’s really exciting.

She is still hands-on with our show, and I’m just so grateful for her talent and her imagination.

I feel really blessed because we are in a golden age of television right now where some of the best work that is happening in Hollywood is happening in television. To be a part of that is really exciting. A lot of that has to do with the fact that there are more writers in television than there are in filmmaking. One of the reasons why our show resonates is that it does have a little bit to do with this antihero moment going on in a lot of our media. There are no good guys, and there are no bad guys. Everything is about flawed human beings just doing the best they can. And I think people relate to that. That’s how we all are— we’re all flawed. We all want to be the heroes of our own lives but are struggling to do that.

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9

DOCTOR WHO

Doctor Who first aired on the BBC in 1963 and is still being produced today. It tells the story of the Doctor, a time-traveling humanoid alien, who explores the universe in a blue police-box-shaped spaceship called the TARDIS. The show has become one of the U.K.’s biggest exports, with legions of Whovians across the globe. It has also hosted some of the U.K.’s leading actors and writers, among them Chris Chibnall, who went on to create Broadchurch. Through the decades a host of actors have portrayed the Doctor—there have been 12, including David Tennant—and there have been a series of head writers. Steven Moffat took the reins from Russell T Davies in 2010.

RUSSELL T DAVIES, FORMER HEAD WRITER, 2012: When I brought back Doctor Who in 2005, I grounded it in real-life emotions, within family and friendships. Frankly, that’s what made it a success. It was the number one show on British television some weeks, ahead of the Simon Cowell shows, the soaps, all of them.

STEVEN MOFFAT, HEAD WRITER, 2013: You don’t really feel much pressure at the beginning of a TV series because you’re just making a home movie in a big shed! You don’t really think anyone is ever going to watch it. Toward April 3, 2010 [the British premiere date for Moffat’s first season as head writer], I started to feel the pressure a little bit. We were doing Sherlock at the time as well and Matt Smith’s Doctor for the first time, so Benedict [Cumberbatch] and Matt were waiting in the wings of fame.

I remember thinking, If these two things screw up, I’m finished! I just thought, What if they’re rubbish? [Laughs] This could be a really terrible year. I could crash Doctor Who and screw up Sherlock Holmes and if I’d just shot Daniel Craig in the face I’d have ended all of British culture. But it didn’t work out that way. [Laughs] It was a very, very good year, and they’ve been very good years ever since.

It’s interesting to look at the three modern Doctors—and there’s about to be a fourth—and see what each of them brings to the show. Christopher [Eccleston] brought a gravitas and an importance, a statement that this is a serious proposition—a famous actor

playing the part [of the Doctor]. He brought a toughness to it, a sensibleness to it. And then David [Tennant] for the very first time got the idea that the Doctor could be cool and sexy—a sort of dashing hero. What Matt

the 50th anniversary special], whether it’s socially or professionally. She’s a great pal. Matt I didn’t know quite so well, but we got on famously. It could have been an awful experience really—by rights it

A national treasure in the U.K., Doctor Who is also one of the BBC’s biggest brands globally, especially in the U.S., where the show has developed a cult following. brought to it, which is the last thing you’d expect from the youngest-ever Doctor, is he absolutely restored the idea that the Doctor is fundamentally an absent-minded professor. Matt’s Doctor is quite, quite mad. I remember David saying, “I wish I had done it like that!” Matt has such a madcap quality that what he brought was more than eccentricity—he’s absolutely insane. If David’s Doctor turned up [at your house] for morning coffee, he’d be fine. He’d be a lovely young man and he’d chat everybody up. Matt’s Doctor would turn up on a camel.

He’s bonkers. The last thing anybody thought when we cast the 26-year-old was that what we’d get is a return to the eccentric old boffin that he is at heart, the hipster boffin.

DAVID TENNANT, THE TENTH DOCTOR, 2014: It’s always a joy to reunite with Billie [Piper, companion Rose Tyler to Tennant’s Doctor, who returned for

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was his show, so with me coming in and trying to jump all over it, he would have had every right to feel a little disgruntled about it. But he couldn’t have been more generous and excited about the prospect himself. It was enormous fun to do.

Doctor Who is always fun. That’s one of the reasons why it is so popular, and it’s as much fun to make as it is to watch. It was lovely to revisit that world and to be part of something that was such a big deal. There are very few TV shows that make it to 50 years. To be part of the celebration of that was wonderful.

MOFFAT, 2013: I frequently call Doctor Who the most perfectly evolved predator in television. It is the perfect television show. It is the show you can’t kill. We could all drop dead tomorrow, all of us who work in Doctor Who, and they’d just carry on making it.

[Laughs] It is dependent on no indi-

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vidual. You give it your all for the years that you do it, and when you leave it won’t even notice—you’ll be shed like scales! And you can recast the Doctor. Not only can you recast the Doctor, you can create a Doctor who is appropriate for the times. He can always be modern. He can always be new. It’s an ancient tradition and yet it’s a brand-new iteration of that tradition.

So it feels old and new at the same time, old and young.

Think of the range of the Doctors— his apparent age can change from the seventies to the twenties and back again. He can be heroic, he can be funny, he can be scary, he can be silly; he can be any of those things.

TENNANT, 2014: You’re very aware that something like Doctor Who has a cultural heritage with it and it has a generationslong appeal. It was particularly won-

derful to be part of something like Doctor Who.

excellent, day in and day out. That is a great environment to work in.

CHRIS CHIBNALL, WRITER, 2014:

TONY HALL, DIRECTOR-GENERAL, BBC, 2014:

I did [an episode] called “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” and that was an impossible brief! Steven Moffat, the showrunner, just gave me the title and said, “Do you want to do that?” I thought, Well, there is no way we can do that on a 45-minute BBC budget!

But we did, and I think what you take from that is there are some really talented people working on that show.

Like a lot of British people, [Doctor Who] is part of my DNA! So it’s always great to drop in and do an episode of that. It’s even more fun working on it than you can possibly imagine! Everybody is great. Everybody loves the show. What’s really exciting about it is you feel that everybody wants it to be constantly

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Somebody like Steven Moffat can work with the BBC to create two fantastic shows in Doctor Who and Sherlock, both of which are hugely popular with audiences, but which have the ability to evolve at their own pace in a way that just wouldn’t happen at a commercial broadcaster.

MOFFAT, 2013: The thing about Doctor Who is it’s a different show every week. It speaks with a different voice on a weekly basis. It must be fast-moving. It must be funny and exciting. Those were all present in Russell’s era, and I hope they are all present in mine. I serve at the pleasure of the TARDIS.

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10 THE BLACKLIST

One of the few breakout hits on network television, The Blacklist has successfully combined the continuing story elements of serialized dramas so popular on U.S. cable channels and the one-case-perepisode formula of broadcast procedurals. Created by Jon Bokenkamp, the series tells the story of exgovernment agent Raymond “Red” Reddington, played with panache by James Spader, who has been one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives. Red turns himself in, willing to help the FBI track down a blacklist of the most dangerous criminals, but with the caveat that a rookie female agent works with him.

JON BOKENKAMP, CREATOR, 2014: The Blacklist came out of an idea between John Fox, one of our producers, and myself. He was also a feature guy; he had no experience in television. I had written one TV script before, and nothing happened with it.

Off of that, John and I were talking and talking about ideas that would be fun and interesting. He wanted to do some kind of show about a mythic crime figure. This was right after [organized crime figure] James “Whitey” Bulger was found in Santa Monica. John’s idea was, What if an 80-year-old man was captured and started to talk? What kind of stories could he tell? We could go back and find out who shot JFK and where Jimmy Hoffa is buried and all of that. That was the kernel of the idea that eventually became the show.

We almost didn’t shoot the pilot, because we couldn’t find a lead, which sounds preposterous to me now! I remember speaking to James for the first time and he was very articulate and intense and specific about the character, and I thought, Wow, this guy is going to be great! But he wasn’t who I was thinking about when I was writing the pilot. But in terms of what James brings to the role, one of the biggest things is just a wonderfully strange sense of humor. We talk daily during production; it can be a lot of fun. When you get him on a roll with something that is just preposterous or something gets us laughing and discovering who the character is, it’s a real joy. We had a bit with this sort of Julian Assange character who had been in house arrest. We thought Red should

bring him a gift when he visits. So he brings him a fruit basket with some vitamins and some Richard Pryor albums. Who would bring Richard Pryor albums, actual vinyl records? Red would! It’s those sort of things, when James and I and John get to giggling about it, there is nothing better than

He is fascinated and interested and open, so for me there is a big element of wish fulfillment with that character. He says and does things that we may want to do or may think about, but he just does them! He isn’t one to sit around and worry about the repercussions. There is a big part

The Blacklist reflects two major trends in drama today—the wave of feature-film talent coming to TV and a move toward more serialized storytelling. that! So one of the things James brings is a wonderful sense of humor, and he is adamant that once we think we know that character, we know nothing about him. We are constantly trying to deepen that character in unexpected ways.

JAMES SPADER, RAYMOND REDDINGTON, 2013: All of my prep is really script-based and imagination, and I read the paper every day. It’s funny, I’ve never been one to read a lot of crime novels or thrillers or espionage. I’ve read a couple of John le Carré novels over the years, but beyond that I’ve never really read that genre very much. But I love to read about that in the papers. That world fascinates me, and I follow it closely. Through your life you meet people who have lived in and out of those worlds.

BOKENKAMP, 2014: Red is a guy who loves being Raymond Reddington. He relishes life.

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of that. Obviously, Spader plays a big part in bringing the character to life.

It’s a show that could easily be dark without much sense of humor, and we try to recognize when stuff is bit of a reach or a bit preposterous—Red acknowledges that. I think there is a bit of self-awareness to who he is.

The biggest thing is the enjoyment that Red and Spader have in living that life.

SPADER, 2013: In the character of Red I saw the possibility for [combining drama and comedy], considering his life and the world he lives in. He’s got a strange and ironic prism through which he sees the world around him, and it’s left him with a strange sense of humor.

Red’s hair was cut very, very short, but I thought it suited him well. His invisibility for the past 20 years has been incredibly significant and important. He’s had to move swiftly and cautiously through life. It just

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this little baggage from previous lives that I’ve had as a performer. So I thought it would be nice that when he takes his hat off in the pilot he does not look like me.

BOKENKAMP, 2014: James is able to play those nuances and subtleties without saying a word, he is very warm and engaging.

I’m fascinated by that, and it’s one of the things we try to do in the show.

I credit Joe Carnahan, who directed the pilot, with a look that was very big and cinematic and muscular, and then we would go in super close for these über-close-ups that were really intimate and warm. We try to do that with the writing and the pacing of the show—we’ll have something that is a big set piece with lots of blood and things exploding, and then all of a sudden we will slow down and take time to let a very specific moment or scene breathe and let the audience just sit with that. That juxtaposition to me is really interesting.

Quite honestly, I don’t watch a lot of network television. A lot of what I have watched most recently have been hyper-serialized cable shows.

I am a huge fan of those characters and of the way those stories can feel very cinematic. Yet at the same time I wanted to try to do something that would fit the network model of a new case each week. That is a constant balancing act that we are still exploring and trying to discover the right balance. At times last season I wondered if we got too serialized, but we don’t want to be too standalone either, because one of the things that is fun about the show is the interplay between the characters and those stories. So it is an interesting tightrope to walk, but it was very intentional from the beginning.

SPADER, 2013: seemed streamlined to me and eminently practical, because no matter where he is he can pop into a little barbershop anywhere and get his hair cut, or he can cut it himself in about ten minutes. It seemed to fit his life very well.

I also liked the idea that my hair was very long when I showed up in New York to start shooting the pilot.

I liked the idea that an old out-of-

date surveillance photo of Red that the FBI had on the Most Wanted list was one with long hair. When you see Red for the first time in the pilot, I liked the juxtaposition that he looks quite different. I’ve never worn my hair this short in anything I’ve ever done. I thought it would be nice that if I’m playing someone who’s come out of the shadows after many years of being away, that he not carry

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[The show] is international in its scope. The character that I play and the world that he inhabits is the international world, and therefore the cast of characters that are going to show up through the series are also international. And the people who work in the intelligence community that he encounters and so on are to a certain degree international as well. I like that about the show.

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