What Amazon's TV Buyers Want Now
Part III of our Fall Market Guide
Elaine covers the TV market from L.A. Today is part of her exclusive tour of what every studio and streamer wants right now and how to pitch them (for paid subscribers only). Previously, she covered Disney’s brands, ABC, Disney+, Hulu and FX, and Apple TV+. 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.
Happy Monday, Series Business subscribers: I’ve got your third installment of our Fall Market Guide series here. Today, we’ve got another pure-play streamer on tap: Amazon.
Production is still experiencing major doldrums (as my colleague Ashley Cullins chronicled last month in her Dealmakers column), to the point where Guv’nor Gavin Newsom rolled out a proposal on Sunday to reinvigorate California’s film and TV economy, which according to the state accounts for 700,000 jobs and nearly $70 billion in in-state worker wages. If passed, the new program would reportedly ramp up tax credits to $3.75 billion over five years, starting in 2025.
That the production slump is likely to continue is reflected in the milder appetites from the major distributors — linear broadcast networks have limited space on the schedule, and streamers are no longer handing out greenlights like candy. But the Jen Salke-led Amazon Studios, for what it’s worth, is one of two places that I’ve consistently heard has been hearing pitches since the strikes ended late last year (the other being Netflix).
In this week’s Series Business, you’ll learn:
The two things every project needs for Amazon to be interested
What its recent greenlights signal for how to sell a show
Who has the power? Prime Video’s unusual organizational structure — and the challenges that creates for sellers
Why there’s a bottleneck in getting shows greenlit
The one new program genre that Amazon’s excited about
How Prime Video’s interest in “white-man-with-a-gun” shows is evolving
The global experiment Amazon’s unlikely to try again
The show whose audience Prime Video is going to continue to serve with new series