Churning out 22 episodes a season may not appeal to today’s up and coming writers but there’s always been an upside to working on a broadcast TV show, insists uber-producer John Wells: it helps to create well-trained showrunners.
While speaking at the HRTS Presidents Luncheon Tuesday with Power creator Courtney A. Kemp and Netflix’s Head of Scripted Series Peter Friedlander, Wells lamented at how quickly many of today’s writers are getting promoted without them spending enough time on set. He remembers how unthinkable it was for a young writer like himself to pitch a new show unless he spent at least seven years on a broadcast series.
“That experience is really important to be able to succeed,” Wells said. “Now very talented people are being elevated into positions and they haven’t really had the experience to [learn] the managerial side of it. And it’s only been made worse by COVID. Writers were not allowed to go on set. One thing the industry has to take responsibility in is making sure creators who become showrunners have the opportunity to get experience on shows. We’re the only business I know where we take someone who hasn’t run something before and say, on a Tuesday, ‘we are gonna give you 30 to 40 million … to hire 150 people over the next two weeks.’”
The point was seconded by Kemp. The creator of Starz’ successful Power franchise remembers how stressful it was to become a showrunner at age 35 with no training, even though she had worked on shows like Bernie Mac and The Good Wife. But Kemp was only a writer on those series, not the boss.
“Being on staff doesn’t teach you how to get someone out of their trailer, or rewrite something that needs to comes in at 8 days instead of 9,” Kemp said. “People don’t understand that if you never go on set, you won’t learn how to run a show. It’s a totally different skill set.”
Friedlander used his time on the dais to talk about how Netflix “members” — not subscribers — want the streamer to stick with its traditional model of dropping entire seasons at a time, rather than doing what others now do successfully by releasing one original episode a week. And though Netflix is definitely in a cost-cutting mode these days, Friedlander insists they aren’t looking to arbitrarily slash budgets across the spectrum.
“We try to appropriately budget shows,” he said. “We want to be great partners [with the studios] on what is the best way to tell the creative vision. We want to be responsible. It’s about being good producers and good stewards to productions.”
Other highlights from the day’s chats:
- Wells shared what it used to cost to produce an episode of ER in its first season and how, adjusted for inflation, what that would mean today. In 1994, Warner Bros. spent $1.23 million per episode on the NBC medical drama. Today, that would be close to $2.3 million. And the most expensive season of ER would today cost around $6.5 million per episode, Wells said.
- Wells said there was something to learn from those hard days on set during the pandemic. Though he won’t miss having “something stuck up my nose 3 times a week for 19 months,” he said the sets were far less chaotic and there was “attention to individual working spaces” for actors.
- Kemp has mixed feelings about the current trend of developing IP into TV shows. One the one hand, “you’ve got some plot in front of you. It changes the level of difficulty.” But then “you have the audience daring you to mess up their favorite piece of IP. I don’t love it. I’m still coming up with new stuff. I know other people are, too.”
- Kemp was loath to weigh in on Jeff Sagansky’s speech at NATPE last week and how he thinks it’s time to change the cost-plus model that’s been adopted by most streamers. Though Wells believes change has to occur, Kemp said she was uncomfortable addressing whether she deserves more cash. “I feel like I’ve run the biggest scale of my life,” said Kemp, who loves the idea of making up characters and dialogue for a living. “I’ve personally been too fortunate to bitch.”
- Friedlander wouldn’t bite when moderator Mike Schneider asked what was next from the Duffer Brothers (though he did say Stranger Things is now the third most watched series of all time on the streamer). But he did try to explain why some shows have shorter lifespans on Netflix than others. “There is no prescribed number of seasons that Netflix wants,” he said. “Our wants are driven by character intent, character journeys. There is no rule book by which we go by. It comes down to cost versus viewership.” And though Netflix has been making a lot of “noise” lately, Friedlander said he’s “brimming with excitement” for the future of their programming.