Five Takeaways from Vulture’s Interview with Showtime’s David Nevins

Vulture’s Josef Adalian sat down with Showtime president and soon-to-be CEO David Nevins as two of the premium network’s biggest shows — Homeland and The Affair — closed out their seasons. Both shows — which are renewed for seasons 6 and 3, respectively — went out strong, with Homeland hitting a season high and The Affair scoring a series best, according to Variety.

Here are five takeaways from the conversation:

Forget Brody. Homeland is now a certified spy thriller.

Anyone who watched Homeland this season, the show’s fifth, was amazed at how closely the show tracked events as they were happening in the world. In fact, the terror attacks in Paris were mirrored on the show, in episodes that were produced long before those attacks happened.

“After Brody (Damien Lewis), the last two years have really been about Alex and the writing staff committing to the idea of this show as a very real-world spy thriller, and trying to tell the story of America’s place in a very complicated world in the 21st century,” said Nevins. “One of the things that’s given energy to the show is how closely it has mirrored what’s actually come to pass. The Paris attacks happened after all but the very last episode was produced. But a lot of the things that led to the attack were addressed in this season. It’s been an amazing feat of synthesis of a lot of themes: strict privacy laws, Edward Snowden compromising some of the tricks of American intelligence, [Russian president Vladimir] Putin trying to assert himself in the Middle East. It all came together in a way that weirdly mimicked what’s gone on in the real world. They took what they heard from people in the real world and turned it into a really smashing spy thriller.”

What that means is that Homeland needs no end game. It just has to reinvent itself every season with a new spy story in a different part of the world. Even Nevins admits the show could live beyond Carrie (Claire Danes) and Saul (Mandy Patinkin), although shows tend to live and die with their stars.

“Do we think a version of Homeland won’t be relevant 15 years from now? Of course it will. Who knows what that version will be, but its franchise is both big enough and specific enough that you could imagine it outlasting any individual character,” said Nevins.

Like HBO, Showtime has evolved into being a network, a premium TV service and an over-the-top offering. That economic model is helping to protect it from the disruption basic cable and broadcast networks are experiencing.

“A lot of the industry trends are really favorable for us. At our core, our business is a subscription business, and that’s the gold standard right now. The decline in advertising revenue and of the big-cable bundle are the big challenges facing everyone in the television industry right now, and our model offers pretty good immunity to those. Everybody understands that you have to pay to get Showtime. We have what everybody in the media wants: a growing subscription base,” said Nevins.

There’s a lot more on Showtime than just Homeland and The Affair.

According to Nevins, Ray Donovan came on strong last summer and star Liev Schreiber was just nominated for a Golden Globe. Coming up is the much-promoted Billions — starring Homeland alum Damien Lewis, Paul Giamatti and Malin Ackerman — Cameron Crowe’s TV series, Roadies, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks reboot, which will air in 2017.

And even more are coming in this age of Peak TV, with Nevins working to premiere one or more new shows per month.

“Rather than launching shows two by two, we’d like to have new programming during as many months of the year as possible,” Nevins said. “It’s a direct response to the way people want to consume streaming TV. They’re waiting for the next new thing. It’s a direct response to an increasingly nonlinear world.

“So little of the viewing of, say, The Affair comes as a result of the fact that it’s parked behind Homeland. Maybe 20 percent of the Sunday night viewership for The Affair also watched Homeland — and then only 20 percent of The Affair’s total viewing comes on Sunday night. Eighty percent of The Affair’s viewing comes on other nights. The idea that you need Homeland to help The Affair, or Shameless to help Billions, is not really true anymore.

“So much of the consumption now is nonlinear, and that’s why I’m starting to spread it out — so we have something new, rather than blowing two premieres at once. We want to have new stuff pretty much every month of the year.”

Showtime is happy with its brand as it stands.

“I don’t plan on doing any radical changes to our brand. I think we have more shows that matter than anybody else. Some people come to us for Episodes, some people come to us for Homeland. But our ten defining shows are more addictive, and have more stickiness, than anyone else’s in this space. We lack something giant like Game of Thrones, which is an amazing show and is as big a worldwide hit as it gets. But after that, we’ve got the biggest depth and breadth. We have series, sports, documentaries, movies. We’re incredibly competitive on all those levels. I don’t think we need to radically differentiate the network for subscribers who come to us over the “Internet. Our brand will evolve, but people are going to come for our shows, however they get to us.”

Brief Take: If ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Read more: Vulture

[Images courtesy of Adweek and Variety]

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