Amazon's Amazing TV Mess: 'Everyone's Afraid of Their Own Shadow'
After Jen Salke's exit, writers, sellers, agents spill tea on the torture of doing business there and what they want to see from 'service guy' Vernon Sanders
Lesley Goldberg reports from L.A. She recently surveyed dozens of writers on how to improve TV development and rethink writers rooms, and she interviewed former CBS entertainment president Kelly Kahl about life after the big job. As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive dispatches from Lesley, Elaine Low and Manori Ravindran on the TV business. This is a standalone subscription separate from The Ankler. For access to Series Business and everything The Ankler publishes, including Sean McNulty's The Wakeup and Richard Rushfield, subscribe here.
When she landed the top job at Amazon Studios in 2018, Jennifer Salke had three main goals: to improve its corporate culture after her predecessor, Roy Price, was pushed out amid allegations of inappropriate behavior; to make the retail giant/streamer a destination for top filmmakers and showrunners; and to deliver hits quickly.
In the seven years that followed, Salke built Prime Video into the No. 2 streamer in the world (yes, from a company that also delivers TP with free shipping) with broad-skewing hits including Jack Ryan, Reacher, Fallout and The Boys as well as critical darlings like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And she did so as Amazon Studios continued to experience growing pains in Hollywood, with frequent executive restructurings that fostered a lack of clarity when it came to what the streamer was really looking for. This murkiness also led to prolonged development stretches that frustrated showrunners and executives alike.
Sources say Salke and her team were taken by surprise when she was dismissed from her role as head of Amazon MGM Studios on March 27 after clashing with James Bond steward Barbara Broccoli, a rift that culminated in a reported $1 billion deal for the studio to take control of 007. The prolonged and messy process capped Salke’s free-spending era that began with plans for a “global franchise” — the now-stalled Citadel — as Amazon searched for its own Game of Thrones. Additionally, Salke was giving out rich first-look deals (Lena Waithe, Brad Pitt, Steve McQueen among them) as she rapidly recruited top talent to the platform en route to winning bidding wars for creatives including Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Donald Glover and Westworld duo Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan.
With Salke — who won’t be replaced as head of Amazon MGM Studios — paid out via a producing deal, the pressure is firmly on her longtime colleague Vernon Sanders, who’s been running TV solo since late 2021 when former co-head Albert Cheng was promoted to VP of Prime Video and shifted to report to Prime Video chief Mike Hopkins.
Sanders, now also reporting to Hopkins, was recruited to Amazon by Salke in 2018 after a decade at NBC — where she was president of entertainment, and he was atop the current programming department. “He was a current exec, not a creative visionary,” says one source familiar with the inner workings of the streamer. “He was Jen’s foot soldier.”
Now the foot soldier is the general, or at least the lieutenant, and Amazon insiders and their partners are figuring out just what the new regime will be, who will be calling the shots and where its TV programming is headed. I spoke with more than a dozen writers/showrunners, executives and agents who have all had dealings with Amazon to see what the streamer — and Sanders specifically — can improve upon now that Salke has left the building.
This week, I report on:
Hollywood’s 3 top pain points with Amazon
Sanders’ reputation in Hollywood and within Amazon, and how people expect him to lead
What agents say Sanders didn’t do to protect Salke
How Amazon’s dense and opaque leadership structure frustrates studios, creators and its own executives
Creatives’ take on Amazon’s numbingly slow development: “You’d get positive reaction to a piece of material from lower-level executives and then it would take forever to move up the food chain and just die.”
Whether Sanders can replace Salke’s smart touch with talent and the speculation about his future: “It’s a question mark”
What even is an Amazon show?
Who’s rooting for the new leadership: “We all need buyers to succeed”
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