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Apparently, not everyone is anxious to see how many people watch House of Cards on Netflix.
Four reps of some of the most successful TV show creators in the industry gathered to discuss how television, and by extension, their careers, are changing, agreeing that ratings for platforms like Netflix and Amazon are not as important to them as they might be to network executives.
CAA’s Adam Berkowitz, ICM Partners’ Ted Chervin, WME’s Ari Greenburg and UTA’s Matt Rice took part in this year’s roundtable, hosted by The Hollywood Reporter, highlighting some of the positive points and frustrations of their jobs today. Below are five key takeaways from the discussion.
1. The “golden age of TV” has some drawbacks on the agents’ side.
“Everyone wants to do television now,” said Berkowitz, reacting to the current boom in scripted television bringing creatives from other industries to TV. “The biggest frustration is the biggest opportunity: a ton of buyers, so there are a lot of people to keep track of,” said Greenburg, adding that with 300 projects being produced, the industry is just overwhelmed with talent.
2. Cable remains a big draw for TV talent.
While cable is relatively new in its ratings success compared to its big broadcast competitors, cable is now king for TV creators, producers and showrunners, even over the newer options of Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Greenburg says that 90 percent of his clients want the next big cable hit, even though top TV talent can’t make the money they used to through cable. While Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner is a proven success story for cable showrunners, not everyone is so lucky. Greenburg and Rice point to shows their clients have at cable channels like FX, which are now lucrative series because of low production costs and high demand.
3. They don’t care how many people watch Netflix series… yet.
Most of the agents agreed that analytics from online platforms like Netflix may be important to network executives, but for their purposes, they’re not as important. Berkowitz said he’s not interested in ratings on Netflix or Amazon at all, though Greenburg and Rice acknowledged that they could be useful years later, when trying to negotiate new deals for clients.
“The only way it’s going to affect us is when you get to season four and five of these shows, and they’re deemed worthy of lasting,” said Rice. “That’s the only place where they may have to share some of that information.”
Greenburg adds that if streaming services won’t provide those numbers, they’ll simply have to make up their own, which will certainly skew in their clients’ favor.
And at that point, the agents have their own strategy for analytics: “We’ll create a new monetary system,” said Rice. “We’ll hunker down and come up with a system of mathematics, in which the four of us will judge what everything’s worth.”
4. Their biggest complaint about the development process? There are just too many people involved.
When asked if they would change anything about getting new shows developed, the resounding answer was “yes, of course.”
Berkowitz argued that the sheer amount of feedback from so many different people at networks causes so much confusion that the show on premiere day sometimes looks nothing like the one that was pitched.
“You’re dealing with the people at the studio, who are telling you what they think the network wants,” he said. “And by the time it gets to the person at the highest level, you don’t really know what their initial thoughts were, and that creates confusion.”
Read more at The Hollywood Reporter.
Brief Take: This roundtable reminds us that some of the most influential people behind new TV series and talent remain behind the scenes, but are responsible for some of TV’s most lucrative deals.
[Image courtesy of THR]
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