Television Development

by Bob Levy

  All development professionals aim to develop series that are relevant to their times and, as a result, the term “Zeitgeist” has become a bit of a development cliché. It’s a cliché, though, because it’s what just about all development is chasing. It gets to basic questions like “Who are we?” and “What defines our times?” What will the cultural expression (that is to say, the storytelling expression, the TV expression) of our times be?

  Think about it: what’s in the air, what’s in the Zeitgeist today? Not trends that might be around for a couple of months or a couple of years. What’s really going on at the deepest levels of our society that will mark our times when historians look back on us in 100 years? The best TV finds ways to dramatize our deepest social and cultural currents, to question, examine and challenge them, sometimes quite literally and sometimes indirectly or even metaphorically.

  Another question TV development ideation sessions often use is: “What TV genres aren’t on TV right now?” In other words, “What has succeeded on TV in the past but is being overlooked now?” As I mentioned earlier, most development professionals are students of TV history. “What’s worked in the past that isn’t on now” leads to a follow-up question: “How do we update what’s worked in the past for our own times?” Private investigator shows thrived on TV for 40 years. Maybe there’s a way to reinvent the genre for a new audience in a new era. What else worked in the past that isn’t on TV now and how can it be reinvented or rebooted for a new audience?

  Another question used to jumpstart series concept ideation is, “What’s taboo in our culture right now?” This is really a smart variation on, “What’s in the Zeitgeist?” The question asks, “What are we afraid of? What are we not talking about? What is our society in denial about?” The undercurrents of society that make people nervous can be the stuff of powerful concepts and stories.

  Another good team ideation technique is to look at what’s popping, what’s blowing up in other facets of American culture. Lloyd Braun looked to feature films and applied one of its biggest recent successes to scripted TV. It’s hard not to imagine that TV development professionals all over Los Angeles are trying to figure out how to appropriate some of the creative elements that made the Broadway phenomenon Hamilton so successful and apply them to TV.

  What else? What else is blowing up in other corners of our popular culture? How can we mine them for TV?

  Inspiration for TV development often occurs in unexpected ways. At the CW’s 2017 network retreat a guest speaker addressed the company’s gathered employees about a charity the network’s philanthropic arm supports, Guide Dogs of America, the non-profit organization that trains guide dogs for blind and visually impaired people. The speaker herself was blind, and the CW development execs who heard her speak felt profoundly inspired by her talk and her personality, particularly her confident, unself-pitying sense of humor. After the talk they agreed that the speaker had left such a strong impression on them that she could serve as an inspiration for a great TV character on their network.

  They also remembered one of their network needs: They knew that the network’s two female-driven one-hour dramedy series, Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, were nearing the end of their series runs, and they were beginning to look for female-driven dramedy replacements. A strong, confident, unself-pitying blind woman character with a great sense of humor became a development target at the CW that season. Network execs shared the area with studios and producers. One production company loved the idea and knew the perfect writer for it, Corinne Kingsbury, a young writer who’d staffed on a few series including The Newsroom and the short-lived Back in the Game on ABC. Kingsbury connected to the idea and developed her vision for a series based on the area with the production company, Red Hour Films (Ben Stiller’s production company).

  Kingsbury imagined a show about a 20-something blind woman, Murphy, who works at her parents’ guide dog school. When a friend is murdered, Murphy winds up being the only witness, albeit a sightless one. The police dismiss her account, and Murphy sets out with her dog to find her friend’s killer, juggling the search with her day job at the guide dog school and an eventful dating life.

  Red Hour and CBS Television Studios brought Kingsbury’s pitch into the network, and the CW execs loved her vision for a series inspired by the target area they had identified. They bought the pitch, developed a pilot script, ordered it to pilot production and that May picked it up to series. In the Dark premiered in the 2018–2019 season, inspired by an area the network execs identified from a serendipitous encounter.

  Takes

  Ideating an area, targeting the area for development, identifying the right writers to expose the area to, waiting until the right writer responds to the area, then commencing active development of the area – these steps are a routine TV development strategy. It happens at all levels of the development food chain: network development execs, studio development execs, producers and, to an extent, agents all do it. The next step is for a writer who responds to an area to go off and do the creative heavy lifting of fleshing out the area into the beginnings of a pitch for a show. We call what the writer creates in that next step a “take,” as in, “Here’s my take on the area you pitched me.”

  The writer comes back to the development pro – network or studio exec, producer or production company development exec – with his take on how to turn the area into an actual show. It won’t include all the elements of a full-blown pitch (which we’ll explore in detail in Chapter 7). It’ll typically just be fleshed out enough for the development professional to have more of a sense of the direction the writer would take the idea. In a “take” a writer typically articulates the world she wants to set the show in, a rough sketch of a few of the lead characters she envisions, the kind of action that will drive the series and a general sense of the tone of the series. In other words, the writer’s take turns the raw area into the beginnings of a true TV concept.

  The writer begins the intellectual and creative process of transforming something “raw” into something “cooked.” The various development professionals all play important roles in development, but it’s usually the writer who performs this crucial work of turning “nature” into “culture” (to use Levi-Strauss’s paradigm).

  The writer comes back with a take rather than a full pitch because, at a project’s outset, development is typically done in small steps. The writer and the person she’s pitching the take to want to make sure they’re in sync, that they’re both thinking about the same kind of show, before the writer rolls up her sleeves and does the huge amount of work to flesh out the take into the next step, the full-blown pitch of the show. If the initial take isn’t heading in a direction the exec or producer is happy with, it’s better to know early, before the writer invests a significant amount of time and energy to flesh out the full pitch.

  In some cases multiple writers might be pitched an area and all asked to come back with takes. In that case, the development professional will pick the take he likes the most and thank the other writers for their time. Writers understand that this is a standard part of the process and are willing to rough out a take on spec knowing their take might not be chosen.

  In 2002 director McG’s producing partner, Stephanie Savage, targeted an area for their production company to pursue that TV development season. She brainstormed ideas and came up with a simple area for a show. McG had grown up in Newport Beach, California, and Savage and McG agreed that world could be a fun, original setting for a new teen ensemble series. That was the extent of the area: teen ensemble in Newport Beach for their production company, Wonderland Sound and Vision, to produce and McG to direct.

  Savage had a general that year with a young writer who had dropped out of USC film school after selling two pilot scripts, and she pitched him the Newport Beach teen ensemble area. Twenty-five year-old Josh Schwartz was intrigued by the area, figured out a vision for a show and came back to Savage with his take. Schwartz pitched a teen soap about a
poor kid from downscale Chino, California, who winds up being taken in by a lawyer and his family at their beautiful Newport Beach home. Savage and McG liked the take and committed to work with Schwartz to develop it into a fleshed-out network pitch. That take turned into The O.C. and lasted four seasons and 92 episodes. Schwartz and Savage teamed up five years later to co-create their second hit show, Gossip Girl. Today Schwartz and Savage run a successful production company, Fake Empire, and are busy writing and producing new series.

  It all began with a simple area and a great take. Schwartz took a raw idea and turned it into a fully developed TV concept.

  Writers also work up takes on IP. If a network, studio or producer controls the rights to a book, for example, a development exec at the company might identify a number of well respected, proven TV writers whose body of work suggests they could be good candidates to adapt the property to TV, select the top writer candidates they want to approach first, confirm with the writers’ agents that their clients are available to tackle new development, pitch the writers’ agents the general idea of the IP to ensure it might be something the client could potentially be interested in considering, then submit the IP to the agents for their writers’ consideration. The writers read the submission and let their agents know if they “respond” to the material enough to engage in the process and work up takes. (“Respond” is the typical industry term – it doesn’t imply too much commitment; all sides, the writer, the writer’s agent and the development exec, move cautiously, no one committing too eagerly or prematurely at the early stages of a project.) The writers who generate takes then meet with the development exec, pitch their takes and begin a potentially long and fruitful partnership.

  As clearly as a book (or any other IP) might appear to lay itself out as a TV show, every writer will have his or her own unique take on turning it into a TV series. The development exec wants to hear a take that succeeds in translating what worked in one medium into an effective TV translation. After hearing multiple takes from different writers, a development exec might believe that none of the writers have “cracked” it. To “crack” an idea or a property means to figure out just the right creative pieces in just the right combination that sound like they hold the promise of successful TV series. A writer “cracks” an idea when he figures out a way to build it into a true TV concept that will hold water and make sense to everyone in the process and ultimately to an audience. In the case of McG’s Newport Beach teen ensemble drama, Josh Schwartz’s take cracked it. His take sounded like it held the promise of a successful show, and he and his take were chosen to move forward to the next step. If a development exec hears several takes and none of them crack an idea, the exec might go out to another group of writers until he finds the writer with the right take that does crack it. If a development exec hears from many writers and none of them crack it, the exec might begin to consider the possibility that, despite his initial optimism, the idea might not lend itself to TV adaption after all and give up on the project.

  Alternatively, a development exec or producer might have an idea exactly who the one perfect writer for her project is and target that one writer, not needing to expose the area or IP to several writers. If that writer responds and the writer and exec agree they’re in sync on the project creatively, they’ll move forward together, obviating any need to go out to multiple writers.

  At any given moment the development sector of the LA TV industry teems with development execs pitching areas and submitting IP to writers, writers pitching back their takes, with agents brokering the process at every step. The industry pulses with a steady flow of ideas – development execs saying, “Here’s something I’d like to turn into a TV show, how would you do it?” and writers responding, “I agree it’s a good idea, here’s how I’d turn it into a show.” Development execs, writers and the agents who mediate between them work day-in and day-out to connect the dots, to find great ideas and the best creative takes to make development marriages and turn ideas into hit TV shows.

  Notes

  1 Author interview with Leslie Morgenstein.

  2 Not to be confused with “story areas,” the short prose treatment format that writers sometimes use to deliver pilot stories to network development executives described in Chapter 2.

  3 TV studio development executives often have their own development retreats while their network counterparts are off at theirs – assistants sometimes even have to coordinate to ensure two groups of execs don’t wind up retreating at the same fancy hotels.

  4 Because Zeitgeist is a German noun it’s typically capitalized when written in English.

  6

  Assessing the Marketplace

  The first priority of TV studios, producers, production company development execs and talent agencies is to build new projects. (I’m excluding network execs from that statement because their first priority is to seek out the most promising new projects that studios, producers and agents are busy putting together. Beyond that first priority, network execs might initiate their own projects too.) Studios, producers and agents focus on ways to create new ideas or areas for potential TV series, to find IP for potential adaptation, and then to marry those ideas, areas or IP with writers. Their next priority is the focus of this chapter: to figure out the right potential home for their new projects, the right networks to which to pitch them. This second priority requires studios, producers and agents to constantly assess the marketplace.

  Like most industries, the TV development business supports a marketplace. A marketplace consists of buyers and sellers. Buyers look for new products to purchase to satisfy their needs. Sellers create products or broker products created by others and shop them to buyers.

  In TV development the networks are the buyers. They are the end-use buyer of all TV development. If a network buys a “piece of development” (a potential TV pilot and series), the project is then considered “in active development,” it’s “set up.” If a project is shopped to networks and the networks all pass, the project is dead for the time being.1

  In TV development the sellers are TV studios, producers and agents. They all put new TV projects together and shop them to buyers, the TV networks. (Remember, I’m using the term “network” as it’s often used in industry practice to refer to all distributors of big-budget scripted series, i.e., the broadcast networks, cable and satellite channels and over-the-top streaming companies.)

  Networks look for new TV projects, potential new series to develop, that can blossom into shows they can program for their viewers, and TV studios, producers and agents look for networks to buy their projects. Buyers look to sellers for new products, and sellers look for buyers of their wares.

  Notice that I’m omitting writers from the list of sellers. This may sound counter-intuitive. After all, it’s the writers who pitch new pilots to the networks. Technically, writers are not sellers but rather a commodity that sellers sell. A development project consists of an idea for a show and a writer to execute the idea (in the form of a pilot script) and to provide a guiding vision for the series beyond the pilot. Most working Hollywood writers don’t think of themselves as mere commodities, of course, and many have entrepreneurial instincts of their own. Some writers think like sellers. In this sense, writers frequently act like producers, which, we’ll remember, is a role most TV writers officially serve in addition to writing. So, technically, when writers do the work described in this chapter, assessing the marketplace and thinking about which networks might buy their pilot pitches, writers wear their producer hats. Many writers, though, choose to focus exclusively on the creative, and leave the work of identifying the best potential buyers for their projects to their producer, studio and/or agent partners.

  Most sellers spend a good deal of time studying the marketplace of buyers. They want to make sure that, if they’re going to invest their time, energy and financial resources into developing a project, there will be a network interested in buying it. If a seller creates a project no network is int
erested in, it’s most likely worthless. Sellers hedge their bets against that loss by constantly assessing the marketplace to ensure there are going to be buyers for their projects.

  A second reason sellers assess the wants and needs of their potential buyers is to tailor their development specifically to address target buyers’ tastes. Several years ago the CW and ABC Family both developed and programmed shows centered on teen lead characters, typically around 16 years old. But, with the arrival of new presidents in 2011 and 2013 respectively, both networks decided to shift the age of their preferred, ideal lead characters from mid-teens to mid-20s. The era of Gossip Girl on the CW transitioned to the era of Arrow. The era of The Secret Life of an American Teenager and Pretty Little Liars on ABC Family transitioned into the era of The Bold Type, as the network rebranded itself from ABC Family into Freeform. Sellers who create projects for those networks needed to know to stop building projects around teen leads and to start building projects around 20-something leads. When IP with teen leads crosses the purview of those sellers, for example, the sellers might consider whether the concept underlying the IP can still work creatively if the lead characters are aged up into their 20s.

  As of this writing, there are 49 network buyers that develop and program big-budget, high-production-value scripted series, the kind of content we think of as “TV shows,” whatever type of screen viewers might watch them on. When I was a kid there were three, only three networks that developed and programmed scripted series. Three total buyers. Those days are long gone and sellers are glad of it. The number of cable channels that offer scripted series and the number of internet companies entering into the business of programming and distributing big-budget scripted series has continued to grow in recent years and most likely will continue to grow in coming years. For sellers, this means more and new buyers. Below is a list of the 49 network buyers of scripted series television as of this writing. I keep this running list, as most sellers do, to keep tabs on the marketplace of buyers.