Two Words TV Buyers are Allergic To Now — and What the Emmys Have to Do With It
Creators and agents tell me about the market’s conservative flight to safety and how little what we saw onstage has to do with it
Elaine Low covers the TV market from L.A. She recently wrote about creators’ reaction to Chick-fil-A becoming a producer, the worries of Hollywood’s top earners and where the TV jobs are (and not). As a paid subscriber to Series Business, you’ll receive richly reported dispatches from both Elaine and Manori Ravindran for a global perspective 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 columns from Richard Rushfield, you can subscribe here.
Never mind that I don’t drink: Staying up past my bedtime this past weekend to hit several Emmy parties was more than enough to have me nursing an extra-large drip coffee today as I type. The circuit included not one but two David Zaslav sightings — at the WME and UTA agency fetes on Friday night — not to mention spotting Bob Iger in the wild chatting with Jon Hamm at Disney’s very merry post-Emmys celebration downtown yesterday.
Disney, of course, took a well-earned victory lap after the show, with record wins for both Shogun and The Bear. FX chief John Landgraf and Carmy himself, Jeremy Allen White, were engaged in a long convo at the start of the party, both no doubt pleased with the proceedings, even if the is-it-actually-a-comedy The Bear wound up losing the top prize to Hacks.
For a complete rundown of the Emmy wins, check out my colleague Katey Rich’s Prestige Junkie newsletter, as well as my appearance on her podcast. But now that we are faced with the cold light of a post-Emmys Monday — with the champagne guzzled and dresses headed to the dry cleaners — what do yesterday’s awards mean for the business today? Will our second Emmys of the calendar year have any real impact on the day-to-day grind of what gets bought and renewed right now?
Think about last night’s big winners. We have a comedy so LOL-barren that even the gentle Emmy hosts Eugene and Dan Levy made jokes about its lack of laughs. The rival that took the best comedy statuette from The Bear, Hacks, is a show about, as co-creator Paul W. Downs pointed out in his acceptance speech, a working woman over 60. Over on the drama side, there’s the massive, long-gestating period drama shot mostly in Japanese and a limited series that featured the fewest household names in its category (Baby Reindeer).
Approximately zero of the agents and studio and network execs I’ve spoken to in the past year have told me this is what the town wants more of. In fact, these series might just be the antithesis of what the market demands. Period pieces and dramedies are out; NBC-style Must See TV is in. Make it 1997 again through science or magic, in the words of 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy.
Less than a decade ago, the Emmys had a reputation not only for helping remarkable shows find an audience (from Hill Street Blues to Mad Men) but also for putting networks and streamers on the map (from FX to Amazon). A big win inspired rivals to try to follow the leader. With a bevy of very convincing wins Sunday night, how open is the door to the big swings of yore?
In this issue, you’ll learn:
The two words TV buyers are allergic to right now
What agents and creators have to do to buck the market’s conservative flight to safety
The FX series that is potentially more important for the future of TV comedy than The Bear
When the Emmys lost their way as an industry bellwether
How prestige lost its luster
Richard Gadd’s counterintuitive example
