TV Outside the Box

Trailblazing in the Digital Television Revolution

Neil Landau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317439714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

TV Outside the Box: Trailblazing in the Digital Television Revolution explores the new and exploding universe of on-demand, OTT (Over the Top) networks: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Crackle, CW Seed, Vimeo, AwesomenessTV, and many more. Featuring in-depth conversations with game-changing content creators, industry mavericks, and leading cultural influencers, TV Outside the Box is essential reading for anyone interested in the dynamics of a global media revolution – while it's happening. Readers will discover:

• How the new "disruptors" of traditional television models are shaping the future of the television and feature film business. You'll hear directly from the visionaries behind it all – from concept genesis to predictions for the future of streaming platforms; their strategies for acquisitions and development of new original content; and how the revolution is providing unprecedented opportunities for both established and emerging talent.

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• What's different about storytelling for the progressive, risk-taking networks who are delivering provocative, groundbreaking, binge-worthy content, without the restraints of the traditional, advertiser-supported programming model. Through interviews with the showrunners, content creators, and producers of dozens of trailblazing series – including Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, Transparent, and many more – you'll learn how and why the best and the brightest TV content creators and filmmakers are defining the new digital entertainment age – and how you can, too.

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Part I
The New Disruptors

“The business models will catch up, but the king, as it has always been, is content.”

CARYN MANDABACH, CEO,
CARYN MANDABACH PRODUCTIONS
(NURSE JACKIE, PEAKY BLINDERS)

Chapter 1

Gamechangers

Tom Fontana

The Man in the HAZMAT Suit

The original trailblazer, Tom Fontana has spent much of his extraordinary 30-year career writing about crime and punishment. Accordingly, I’d be committing a felony by not starting the story of the digital television revolution with him. Not only did he create, write, and produce Oz, the first-ever scripted drama for HBO and indeed premium cable, but he also created the first show for BBC America (Copper), and the first Netflix Original (Borgia).

Fontana was also showrunner on the groundbreaking police series, Homicide: Life on the Street. He and longtime producing partner, Academy Award winner Barry Levinson, together with credited creator Paul Attanasio, adapted the series from the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by Baltimore Sun reporter, David Simon. Simon wrote for Homicide, and then went on to create one of the greatest series of all time: The Wire.

Both Fontana and Levinson felt that Simon’s gripping, nonfiction book, rich and expansive, would work better as a TV series than a movie. The only catch was, Levinson had no interest in making a traditional network procedural, in which a crime is committed in the teaser, and by the end of the episode the perp is brought to justice. Problem solved. Neither Fontana nor Levinson wanted formulaic. Both wanted to explore the gray areas, where there are no easy answers. There was a caveat: in order for Levinson to commit to a series, he wanted to make the first-ever police procedural with no gunplay, no car chases, no pat resolutions. Fontana told him: “That’s impossible. Let’s do it!”

Years later, in the series finale of Oz, when a mysterious package arrives at Oswald Penitentiary containing the deadly chemical anthrax, chaos ensues. Everyone is evacuated. Even death row inmates are loaded onto buses. Free at last, at least temporarily. Then the hazardous materials task force enters the prison to mitigate the disaster. If you look closely at the first responder, the man in the HAZMAT suit, that’s Tom Fontana, making his first and last cameo. It was a fitting grace note for such a landmark series, emblematic of Fontana’s entire career: an artist not afraid to take risks.

Whether he was battling network censors for permission to use the word “testicle”—in an episode about a patient battling testicular cancer on St. Elsewhere; depicting a severely homophobic inmate showing mercy to a suffering terminal AIDS patient through euthanasia; or injecting a surreal, Greek chorus-like, omniscient, wheelchair-bound narrator on Oz, Fontana is always a courageous, inspirational, provocative storyteller.

Neil Landau: You made the first-ever drama series for HBO, BBC America, and Netflix. You’re going to be the lead interview in my book. Another first. How about that?

Tom Fontana: It should also be noted that Barry Levinson and I did a series on the WB¹ [The Bedford Diaries] and we were the last drama series on the WB. So we don’t just start networks, we also get networks canceled.

NL: [laughs] Well, yes, rarely. But it points to your willingness to take risks and break new ground.

TF: I appreciate your saying that. I think part of it is, I get these sort of crazy, half-assed notions in my head about trying something that I’ve never done before. I pitched variations on prison shows to all 4 of the broadcast networks, and they looked at me like I had gone completely insane.

I would like to pretend that I have some incredible far-sighted vision of the future of our business and all that stuff. The reality is, I have been incredibly lucky and managed to walk up to a door and open it at exactly the moment that I needed the door opened, and they needed someone to open the door.

NL: You also bring your game. If the door opened and you weren’t able to create such high quality programming that sustains, that would be the end of that.

TF: You’re absolutely right. I do think that if someone is going to take a risk on me, I have an obligation to do the very best that I can and really cause as much trouble as I can.

NL: Chris Albrecht took a chance green-lighting Oz as the first scripted drama for HBO and if it didn’t work—who knows? Maybe they wouldn’t have continued making original series.

TF: I carried the weight of that the whole first season, because I kept thinking to myself, “If I fuck this up Chris is going to say to the next guy in the door, ‘I trusted Fontana and I got screwed for it, so I’m not trusting you.’ ” I feel good about the fact that I didn’t screw it up and David Chase [The Sopranos] was the next one through the door.

NL: He didn’t screw it up either.

TF: Neither did Alan Ball [Six Feet Under].

NL: You were ahead of your time, not afraid to disrupt conventional expectation. In Oz, for example, as soon as things calmed down in prison, as soon as a character became comfortable, your instinct, which proved right, was to kill somebody off, or throw a curveball which replicated the feeling of a real prison. Dangerous, claustrophobic, unpredictable. You liked to continually shake things up and keep your audience on edge. You always challenged us, when for the longest time TV existed to reassure us.

TF: That’s right. In the past, the goal was to reinforce the sensibilities that we were all hoping were true, but obviously both turned out to be more fictional than any TV series we watched. As more and more sort of lies in society got exposed, the writers were allowed to have more freedom.

NL: We’re experiencing a wave of diversity on TV. From Empire, Fresh Off the Boat and Black-ish to East Los High and Shonda Rhimes’ How To Get Away with Murder and Scandal. You’ve always had diversity on your shows, both on screen and behind the scenes: a trailblazer on that front, too. Yet, if we look back to the 1970s, we had diversity on TV. Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin’s shows (All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time) offered healthy debate on what were controversial topics (divorce, abortion, interracial marriage, gay rights, addiction, rape) and all managed to thrive on primetime network television … then the TV business regressed. What happened?

TF: It’s not only the television industry that’s cyclical, it’s American society. What happens is that we have moments of incredible intensity, like the chaos in Baltimore, and we all talk about it. Or a kid goes into a school and shoots a bunch of kids and we talk about guns. We go through these intense conversations about what’s going on with the moral fabric of American society. Then we all just kind of settle back and get into the rhythm of our lives and stop thinking about the negative aspects. During the 1970s the other part of television, which is dangerous happened: the success of one thing becomes the thing that is copied and imitated, by all others.

NL: So true.

TF: If you look at the phenomenal popularity of Friends, for example, all we were seeing were shows about young people who were friends and lived in apartments. They all were white, and they were all sort of middle class. I think a show comes along that breaks the mold, like All in the Family, then there’s a rush to imitate it because people go, “Oh, that’s successful.” Because that’s the nature of Hollywood. Dorothy Parker once said the ugliest word in Hollywood is, “Another.” Let’s make another. Anytime you see a Roman numeral after a movie, it’s a cause for unhappiness rather than celebration, you know? So I don’t think television leads, I think television follows for the most part—certainly in drama and comedy. I think we just sort of follow whatever is popular. It’s unfortunate, but that’s what happens.

NL: I think audiences are getting more comfortable not watching commercials, which is going to have a significant impact on advertisers—who traditionally rely on broadcast network Standards and Practices to protect their brands. That’s one of the main reasons the broadcast networks have played it safe, and endeavor not to offend anybody. With the emergence of subscription-based digital networks, we’re seeing niche worlds and once marginalized “fringe” characters, such as Jeffrey Tambor’s transgender Maura, front and center. Instead of sticking with the tried, true and safe, newer content providers are seeking out what’s different and breaks the mold. You have been witnessing it all as it’s been evolving. What’s your perspective on the new normal?

TF: I do think it’s incredibly exciting, but I think it’s impossible to predict. You know, old idiots like me will hang around watching TV even on the broadcast networks, until we’re too feeble to push the remote. I think a child, somebody who was born in the last 10 years, has such a capacity and a different understanding of the universe—the media universe too—than anybody my age. The demand they are going to make for their content is mind boggling, but it is truly exciting because you say, “Who knows, who knows what this is going to end up being?” When William Paley started CBS Radio and Sarnoff started NBC Red and NBC Blue, they had no idea how long radio would last, and what the new technology of television was going to do to this thing they had brought to life. So it’s fantastic. I wish I was going to be here.

NL: No matter what, your legacy, your place in history, is forever. Let’s talk about Borgia on Netflix. I have to confess, even being such a big fan of your work, I previously only knew about The Borgias on Showtime.

TF: It’s interesting because both shows were being developed simultaneously, and we went over to Showtime to pitch it to [then Showtime President] Bob Greenblatt, who said, “Well, we’re developing our own Borgias, so maybe we should do the 2 together.” I flew to Dublin to have a meeting with Neil Jordan, and within about 5 minutes we both realized that we wanted to make completely different television shows. Then it went into this sort of, “OK, they’re on cable,” and fortunately, at that moment Netflix was looking for something, and my agent Peter Benedek arranged for them to buy the series. And, in fact the second season they even upped the amount so they could own more territory.

At that point I remember Peter asking the head guy at Netflix, “What kind of advertising you going to do for Borgia? and he said, “None. All of our advertising is going to be through our subscribers.” That’s why it wasn’t widely known, unless you were already a Netflix subscriber and unless it triggered their recommendation algorithm. That being said, from my understanding and I don’t know how they measure these things, Borgia did very well for them. It was in like the top 10 for them.

The reality is, I got to make the TV series about the Borgia family that I wanted to make. Canal Plus and Netflix and all the other international partners were extraordinary in letting me; almost like the way it was when we started doing Oz on HBO. It was like, “You’re the creative person; we’re going to let you do it the way you want to do it.”

NL: With both Copper (for BBC America) set in 1860s New York during the Civil War, and Borgia that begins in 1492, does your creative process differ on an historical series versus present day?

TF: I love history. I’m obsessive about history. But there is no reason to do a show in the past unless it has parallels to what’s going on now. For me, the problem with doing a show about the Pope is that people assume it’s about attacking the Catholic Church, which was never my intention. I had 2 goals. 1, to examine the 3 main characters’, Rodrigo, Cesare and Lucrezia’s different approaches to faith—Rodrigo being old school, Lucrezia being very progressive and Renaissance oriented, and Cesare being an atheist.

Another element that I wanted to explore was, at that time and to this day, the Catholic Church was a business that sells probably the greatest product that one can sell: salvation. I wanted to use Borgia not so much about the machinations of the Catholic Church, than what it’s like to be in a corporation, let’s say the Murdochs [News Corp] or any family that has a major stake in one company, and see how that plays out. What’s great is, when you are doing something historical you can make it less a polemic and more of an adventure for the audience, so they’re not feeling preached to, which I despise. When I watch a television show that is basically lecturing me on something, especially social issues, I get very irritated. On every show I’ve done, I’ve only tried to raise questions. I’ve never tried to prove how smart I was, because I don’t have the answers.

NL: Which is consistent with your upbringing as a Jesuit, and the principles of “question, judge, think, and argue”—which are reflected in all your work.

TF: Yes, and the truth of it is, I don’t think TV’s job is to preach. I think it’s our job to make people decide for themselves, by giving them 2 or 3 sides of an issue.

NL: In Borgia, how much dramatic license did you allow yourself in telling this well-documented story, especially when so much of the documentation was embellished for better and for worse? Isn’t history almost always written by the winners?

TF: I decided that these main 3 characters would each be going on an individual journey over ...