Indie TV: ‘Holy Shit, This is a Viable Model’
Film’s done it for decades. Now Cooper Raiff, Duplass Brothers & Joe Lewis tell me about self-financing shows: ‘Way less crazy.’ No wonder TV execs are nervous
Elaine Low recently reported on the unscripted TV market in 2025, as well as what kinds of scripted shows are being bought at HBO and Max, Netflix, Prime Video, NBCU and Peacock, ABC , Disney+ and FX, Apple TV+ and CBS, Paramount+ and Showtime. As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive richly reported dispatches from both Elaine 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.
For the past few days, a good chunk of The Ankler team has been at Sundance, trudging along slushy Utah streets to engage in cinéma and, if you’re Richard Rushfield, to wear this hat and drink hot chocolate.
Also in Park City for the festival is Cooper Raiff, the writer and director of Cha Cha Real Smooth, which just three years ago was a festival competition title that got snapped up by Apple TV+ for $15 million. This year, he’s shopping Hal & Harper — not an indie film, which would be a tough enough sell in 2025, but rather an independently financed TV series, whose path is even less clear.
Raiff, 27, is part of a new wave of small-screen creators exploring the indie TV model, scraping together funding outside of the studio system to produce not only pilots but often entire seasons of television on spec, with the intent to license or sell their shows to a streamer or network.
Hal & Harper centers on a pair of siblings, played by Raiff and Lili Reinhart, and their complicated relationship with their father (Mark Ruffalo). Its first four of eight episodes screened at Sundance and met with warm reviews so far, especially for the lead actors’ performances.
Though he originally had Hal & Harper set up at a traditional buyer, Raiff found himself chafing at the studio process, including the notes from development execs. “It wasn’t gonna get made in the way that I wanted it to get made because they were really talking a lot about making it more of a college show,” he recalls, adding that the conversation was more about the platform’s needs than the story’s. “They were just thinking constantly about like, we don’t have this kind of show, and we can fit this kind of show into this.”
The TV execs wanted to excise the dad character, for example. “I think that the show got made in the right way now that it’s independent,” Raiff tells me a handful of days before the festival.
The hope is that after last night’s screening at Sundance, an interested party with a pocketful of cash will emerge. Raiff is pragmatic about his odds.
For Cha Cha, “I went into Sundance [in 2022] feeling comfortable with the fact that there are people here to watch the movie, because they’re here to buy movies,” he says. This time around, he continues, “I don’t have that at all. No one right now making independent TV has that — ever. So you’re not going in anywhere thinking, ‘Okay, these people are here to buy TV shows, and my TV show is one of them.’ You’ve got to get their attention.”
Mark and Jay Duplass blazed the indie TV trail with Animals a decade ago, which premiered its first two episodes at Sundance in 2015 (before the festival even had an Episodic section, which it added in 2018). But this business model has more recently begun to gain steam, mimicking the indie filmmaking scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s.
“I’ve always felt — since I was an independent filmmaker in the early 2000s — that there’s no reason we can’t directly model that for television,” says Mark Duplass. “It’s a little more expensive upfront because obviously, in order to make a whole season of TV, it’s much more running time than a 90-minute film. But besides that barrier to entry, everything else, to me, models perfectly.”
In this week’s Series Business, I dive into the wild, wild West of indie TV making and explore:
The kinds of shows that have the best chance to sell as indies
The different ways to finance indie TV
How indie TV can be more lucrative than traditional development for both creators and financiers
Amazon Studios co-founder Joe Lewis’ philosophy on developing the next Fleabag — without an Amazon to back it
How the industry is adapting to this new model — and why it makes some studio executives nervous
What’s in it for studios and distributors
Why Mark Duplass thinks of indie TV as “lottery tickets”