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When former Fox Entertainment President David Madden joined AMC in September 2017—two months before news of Disney’s planned acquisition of 21st Century Fox—he “came into a network that wasn’t broken, so it didn’t need to be fixed.”
“But the brand is complicated,” Madden, president of original programming, AMC Studios, said Friday at the Drama Summit West 2018 conference in Los Angeles.
He sees AMC as a network split into two tracks. One is genre, with series such as The Walking Dead franchise, Preacher, and Terror tapping into the horror, science fiction and supernatural arena. The network is also built on powerful character dramas such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and that lives on in Better Call Saul and Halt and Catch Fire, which wrapped this year.
“What we’ve tried to do is adhere to these two tracks, but then try expanding it,” Madden said.
Enter Dietland, set to premiere June 4. With a bent towards dark comedy, the show stars Joy Nash as Plum Kettle, an overweight ghost writer for the editor (Julianna Margulies) of one of New York’s hottest fashion magazines. It’s also positioned around the phenomenon of men accused of sexual abuse and assault who begin disappearing and meet untimely, violent deaths.
“It was greenlit before the MeToo movement,” Madden said. “We thought we were doing a show wildly ahead of its time, and the time caught up with the show.”
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If there’s any criticism of AMC, “one could say it’s an ‘old white guy network,’” said Madden, pointing out that many of the leading roles on the network’s shows are dominated by middle-aged men.
“Dietland is a women’s’ show,” he said, adding that he hopes to bring more diversity, both in front of and behind the camera, to AMC.
Dietland will also be followed by an hour-long “talking” companion show, Unapologetic, that discusses each episode but positions the conversation around the news and culture happening that day or week.
“As a linear network—a quote ‘old fashioned network’—competing with streaming platforms, we try to look at what we can do that streaming platforms can’t do,” Madden said. Aftershows have emerged as a hallmark of AMC that extends the brand, led by The Walking Dead’s Talking Dead, and AMC continues to look for ways that viewers can interact with its programming through initiatives like merchandising, live events and gaming, he said.
Madden admits that ratings for The Walking Dead—while still high—have decreased over the last year, but says the series is still going strong.
“Creatively, we are doing some different things in season nine,” he said. “The all-out war storyline probably lasted longer than it needed to. Now we’ve finished that story in a way that’s really satisfying, and season nine takes a big time jump, with new situations and a different tone.”
The network’s AMC Premiere digital offering also allows Xfinity subscribers to binge new seasons of its series rather than watching weekly. He’s found that it’s really two separate audiences, and one doesn’t seem to cannibalize the other.
“We still, at AMC, live in a world where the linear platform is really valuable,” he said. “But we know people like to watch shows in different ways.”
Competing with the volume of shows produced by streamers such as Netflix, which plans to invest $8 million in original content this year, comes with its challenges, Madden said. But AMC is focusing its values on quality over quantity.
The strategy we have is we’re going to make fewer shows,” he said, “but we’re going to treat each show with love and passion.”
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