Pay Players’ Hit List

The mailer arrived on the desks of national TV journalists early this month. Inside was a large portfolio of artful black and white images with provocative captioning, the first in what is expected to be a number of promotional props aimed at hyping the still-in-development 13-episode hour-long Crash, Starz’s first-ever drama series based on the 2005 Academy Award-winning movie.

With Crash in its original series lineup, Starz is attempting to position itself as a real competitor to its larger premium rivals, HBO and Showtime, where hit shows like The Sopranos and Dexter, respectively, have added cachet to each brand and subscribers to their networks.

In spite of the now-settled Writers Guild of America strike, 2008 is shaping up to be a strong year of original programming for the premium networks.

These days, originals are particularly important to executives at premium networks because the business model they were founded upon, getting viewers to subscribe to watch movies uncensored and without commercial interruptions, fundamentally doesn’t exist anymore, according to Sacramento Bee TV critic Rick Kushman.

“People now get movies on demand and through Netflix and all kinds of other ways. Nobody is buying HBO so they can finally get to see the latest action flick or whatever it is,” Kushman said.

With the bar raised by such shows as HBO’s provocative Sex and the City and Showtime’s dark comedy Weeds, series development becomes even more challenging with each new season, Kushman said.

“Now we — as journalists and as viewers — expect good things out of them. We won’t settle for mediocrity out of HBO or even Showtime. They’ve positioned themselves as the Lexus and Mercedes of television, so now they’ve got to keep producing these really hot cars, and to a lesser extent Starz, which is just going to have problems getting noticed.”

HBO was the first network to prove that original programming could be done — and done well — on premium cable. Bolstered by great writers, complex stories and stellar performers, there were few — in broadcasting, as well as cable — that could top it.

But since then Sex and the City heroine Carrie Bradshaw has sauntered off into the proverbial sunset with Mr. Big and the lights went out on Tony Soprano & Co. Now, a growing crop of like-minded quality shows have begun springing up and garnering praise and eyeballs for pay-competitor Showtime, as well as basic players such as FX and AMC.

“Everyone is a competitor at this point—and you’re competing with not just other networks, but other platforms,” said Charlie Collier vice president and general manager of AMC.

“I’m just guessing that when HBO was out there on their own, there had to be a little bit of complacency that, 'Well we’re out there, were still ahead of the game, we’re not TV, we’re HBO, so we’re always going to win,’ ” USA president Bonnie Hammer said. “Complacency sets in really easily and I think when there are a whole lot of people competing for that gold ring, it puts people’s feet under the fire in a very positive way … I think it’s a real motivator for a team.”

HBO’s Michael Lombardo denies assertions that the network has been resting on its laurels. That, in fact, successes like The Sopranos — which recently swept the Screen Actors Guild Awards — and Sex and the City “from a press standpoint took a much bigger chunk of the oxygen in terms of when they discussed HBO. When [those shows] ended, a lot of questions have been, 'Where’s the next one?’ ” said Lombardo, president of the programming group and West Coast operations, noting Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the channel’s award-winning documentaries and original films as other successes for the network. “But I think the question is: What’s next for HBO? And we’re excited about what’s on the air.”

By most critical accounts, the fifth and final season of one of HBO’s most lauded series, The Wire has been its best yet. Its newest series, In Treatment, also bowed to largely favorable reviews with The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz deeming it “a worthy successor to The Sopranos.”

She added, “It is odd that the network that has tried long, hard and haplessly to come up with anything remotely equal to the power and creativity of its blood drenched saga has finally succeeded in a series entirely shrouded in the quiet of a therapists’ office.”

But when it premiered in January, the new shrink series only had 446,000 viewers on the couch, the lowest numbers ever for one of its Monday night originals — about half of the audience that tuned in to its last original series, the sexually explicit hour-long relationship drama, Tell Me You Love Me, which premiered in September.

In Treatment was decidedly ambitious even by HBO’s account. The half-hour series, starring Gabriel Byrne as a psychotherapist, runs new episodes five-nights a week at 8:30 p.m. with each night devoted to a particular patient.

“We had never really thought of that construct for ourselves,” said Lombardo of the series, which is based on an the Israeli show, Be’Tipul. “In the states that generally spells soap opera, it’s relegated to a different space in American entertainment. But I think we all got unbelievably excited about telling a story in that way.”

The unusual scheduling, however, gave the network the opportunity to play the series across other platforms, including HBO.com, HBO On Demand and iTunes. The network, which reports 40 million subscribers, including Cinemax, also launched a Facebook group for the show to help fuel buzz online.

“The beauty of airing a daily film is that people are going to be attracted to some of the storylines and not others,” Lombardo said. “It really allowed people to play with and enjoy the show in a multitude of fashions.

“It’s great for us if people enjoy watching five nights a week,” he added, “but we fully assumed that there are going to be people that find one or two of those storylines more compelling than the others and are watching once or twice a week or on demand or on their [digital video recorder].”

The network rounds out its slate for the first and second quarter with two original films. Bernard and Doris, which debuted Feb 9, concerned real-life billionaire Doris Duke and her Irish butler, played by Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes. Recount, debuting in May, follows the 2000 election recount in Florida, with an ensemble led by Kevin Spacey.

On March 20, the seven-part American history epic, John Adams, premieres starring Paul Giamatti as Adams. Then later this year, HBO will debut Generation Kill, a seven-part military miniseries written by The Wire’s David Simon and Ed Burns, as well as non-scripted comedies, documentaries and sports offerings.

In March, HBO goes into production on the Alan Ball Southern vampire drama True Blood, with returning series Entourage and Big Love set to begin shooting in April and May, respectively. At press time, production schedules for second seasons of Tell Me You Love Me and the quirky Flight of the Conchords were not locked, but the network expects those shows to lens later this year.

Still, with no true watercooler show in the foreseeable future, MediaWeek columnist Marc Berman sees HBO’s fate as similar to NBC’s in the ’90s. “NBC at one time was the home of 'Must See TV’ and the years passed and the shows like Seinfeld and Cheers and Frasier got older, they were unable to find the next generation of big hits,” he said.

“HBO keeps backfiring with shows like John From Cincinnati, and they don’t have anything right now that people are jumping about,” Berman continued, “and suddenly Showtime comes out of nowhere with Californication and Dexter and The Tudors, and the critics started talking and viewers are listening and Showtime becomes the next HBO.”

Showtime. The new HBO. It’s an often-heard statement these days, and it makes Lombardo shudder.

“I guess what gives me pause is the notion that HBO has gone anywhere,” he said. “Look, there’s always going to be a new kid on the block and they are going to be interesting because there’s a new story there. We have had to remind ourselves that there’s room enough for everybody here. There’s no diminution in who we are because there’s interest in looking at Showtime and their programs.”

There is certainly no way to downplay the year that Showtime has had. In December, a record-breaking 1.23 million viewers tuned in to the watch the second season finale of Dexter. Californication, which stars Golden Globe winner David Duchovny, was added for a second season, joining the channel’s most stable slate of series including The L Word, now in its fifth season, and the channel’s most watched series, Weeds, starring Golden Globe winner Mary-Louise Parker which is heading into season four.

“So much of it is timing and writers actually being inspired when they get the writing staff together — there’s a lot of things,” said Showtime president Robert Greenblatt, crediting that and “a lot of luck” for much of the network’s newfound success. “This is a hugely collaborative effort and it’s really hard to hit the bull’s-eye, so when I look at the nine or 10 shows that we have across the board, from This American Life to Dexter it’s just an extraordinary array of shows. I won’t say we’ve hit the bull’s-eye every time, but we’ve hit the bull’s-eye a lot more than I thought we would.”

Showtime this year scored a new series, State of the Union, with comedienne Tracey Ullman, whose 14-year association with HBO included the award-winning series, Tracey Takes On.

“I know Tracey made a great splash on HBO, but I go back to the original Tracey Ullman Show which was on Fox when I was at Fox,” said Greenblatt who was a development executive there at the time. “So I’ve loved her for 15 years. She’s just in a class by herself in terms of doing these multiple characters, and the fact that she wanted to do another show at all was great, and we were thrilled that she wanted to come to Showtime.”

The Ullman project is scheduled to premiere March 30, following The Tudors second season premiere, at 10 p.m. Already in the production pipeline are The United States of Tara, a half-hour single-camera comedy written by Juno’s Diablo Cody and starring Toni Collette as a mom with multiple personalities and the dysfunctional family drama Possible Side Effects from writer-director Tim Robbins.

Fortunately, said Greenblatt, “we managed to complete everything we needed to complete before the writer’s strike and there was a natural hiatus to everything,” he said.

Also on tap at Showtime, which now reaches 15.5 million subscribers is acquired series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, a British hit series Greenblatt describes as being “like Sex and the City if Samantha were one step further sexually.”

The show came to the network by ex-HBO chief Chris Albrecht who heads the global media business for IMG. It debuts on June 16, following the fourth season opener of Weeds.

Like HBO, Showtime will continue to flaunt shows featuring complex, flawed and, sometimes, morally challenged characters, even though basic cablers like FX and AMC are following the same model with their shows. (See story, page 13) So what makes pay cable worth the subscription rate?

Beside the movies, “we have a very strong boxing lineup which many critics have written in the last year to 18 months has bested even HBO’s boxing lineup,” Greenblatt said, also noting pay-cable’s most important distinction: no commercial interruptions.

“Everywhere you look there’s some kind of sponsor. Have you watched Bravo lately? Every five minutes — and they have some great shows — but within the entire length of a show, I watched Project Runway, and there are banners and pop-ups and walking characters in the lower right hand corner of the screen or left hand corner,” he said, “They’re constantly selling to you and promoting and promoting and promoting. We’re still the last bastion of that, there’s no commercializing of the network. I think that will always be a haven for people.”

Starz is looking to flip the script on its acquisitions-only model to become a destination for original shows for people who love movies and movie stars.

The network’s pick up of Crash, produced and distributed by Lionsgate, with a budget of about $25 million per episode, is a serious indication that Starz is gung-ho about getting into the originals game.

“The basic problem right now is that people don’t think of it as a place for original programming,” said Eric Deggans, TV and media critic at Florida’s St. Petersburg Times.

The 16-million subscriber premium cable network is known primarily for its theatrical release from such studios as Sony Pictures and The Walt Disney Co.

“The premium cable channels have often, when they’re trying to establish themselves as purveyors of original programming, attempted to target groups of viewers that are not well served by mainstream cable and mainstream networks,” said Deggans, noting the early years of HBO’s African-American skewing series like The Chris Rock Show, Def Comedy Jam and Def Poetry Jam and Showtime’s gay-themed Queer as Folk and The L Word.

Other than Def Comedy Jam and maybe The Wire, “there are not a lot of shows on any of those networks that directly speak to people of color,” Deggans added, “so it makes a certain amount of sense that they might do Crash which not only talks about race, but was consider to be high quality and did very well at the Oscars and people viewed as a prestige project.”

Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco, Bob Yari and Don Cheadle, all involved with the original film, will serve as producers on the new series, which Deggans sees as “a signal to the creative community and a signal to the industry that [Starz] didn’t just buy the rights to the name and the plot and get some hacks to crank out scripts — they’ve got the guys who were integral in the creation of the film also involved in creating the TV show. “It is also a signal to us who write about TV that this is something we should pay attention to. Their other two original shows, frankly, don’t have this kind of pedigree.”

Last month, Starz’s celebrity-centric half-hour improv comedy series, Hollywood Residential, with Adam Paul as the host of a celebrity home “improvement” show and Head Case with Alexandra Wentworth who plays a therapist to the stars met with underwhelming reviews. But channel executives are not deterred.

“They are an extension of our brand,” said Michael Ruggiero, vice president or original programming for Starz Entertainment Group, “and we thought the best way to do that was to include the Hollywood element, feature celebrities, actors and actresses that are featured in the movies that we air.”

For instance, when Starz scheduled Pittsburgh, an independent film starring Jeff Goldblum, the network also courted the actor for an appearance on Head Case.

“Actually the people who come to us are really anxious to be a part of it because the improv angle of this is something that is very freeing to an actor,” said Ruggiero. “Some surprising people like Jeff Goldblum, who you wouldn’t necessarily think of as an improv comedian, but who was anxious to show that he could do that, and he does it well.”

Added executive vice president of programming Stephan Shelanski: “We think these shows are innovative and will work well across all of our platforms,” he said. “We’re not moving away from a movie strategy, but taking a movie strategy and building off of it. What’s the next step for us? Movies.”

Going forward, Wednesday and Saturday nights will be primetime for Starz originals, with comedies launching in January and dramas in August. In between, the network will schedule its slate of original documentaries.

“We’ll do six to eight documentaries this year,” said Ruggiero, “and they’ll explore everything from, one is about Pixar, one will be about special effects makeup in film, one will be about character actors, one will be about fashion in film. Each special will have a different view on Hollywood and what’s going on in film.”

While Starz plans to be aggressive in promoting its shows — along with a new branding and marketing campaign scheduled to kick off in April — Ruggiero said they’ll be thrifty with their originals budget for now.

“HBO and Showtime, roughly half of their programming budgets will go to originals. That’s not the case with Starz, and there are no plans for that in the near future,” he said. “What we’re doing is adding to what we have now, so originals for us are important because we want to help our brand and offer exclusive content, and we think as a pay channel we can do shows that are unique and take advantage of the pay TV environment.”