Speaker 1: I will say for me, anything I've ever been involved
Speaker 1: in I thought was good. I've never said the words
Speaker 1: this is a hit. You know, you look at it
Speaker 1: and you go, this is first like this is a thing.
Speaker 1: There's something here, and if we keep doing this, it's
Speaker 1: going to be good, and if we get a little lucky,
Speaker 1: it actually will be something significant. And that's just the
Speaker 1: way I've always looked at it. I've never been surprised, like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I had no idea that was good.
Speaker 1: But I've certainly been surprised on the downside times. But
Speaker 1: I've definitely been surprised when finally not pleasantly, like oh
Speaker 1: my god, they're catching on to what we've known for
Speaker 1: a while. Kevin Riley was a president OFBC Entertainment through
Speaker 1: the entire first chapter of the Office, from when the
Speaker 1: show was pitched, all the way up through the development
Speaker 1: and the first couple of seasons of the show, the
Speaker 1: modest and humble beginnings of a tremendous television show.
Speaker 2: Hello, everybody, so glad that you could join me today
Speaker 2: for this very special episode of Off the Beat. I
Speaker 2: am but your humble host Brian Baumgartner. Today we have
Speaker 2: a fascinating guest. I know you're gonna love it. Kevin
Speaker 2: Riley joins the program once again. For those of you
Speaker 2: who don't know, Kevin is a goliath in the television world,
Speaker 2: a legend who makes television work from the inside out.
Speaker 2: More on that in a bit. It's hard to believe
Speaker 2: that he started out as a production assistant, running coffee
Speaker 2: orders and making copies for music videos, and he worked
Speaker 2: his way all the way up to being network president
Speaker 2: at multiple networks. By the way, his resume looks like
Speaker 2: alphabet soup. That's a business term. He's worked for just
Speaker 2: about every television acronym there is, NBC, FX, TNT, TBS, HBO, Fox,
Speaker 2: Turner Media, and many many more. He's advocated for some
Speaker 2: of your favorite shows, including The Office, which we have
Speaker 2: talked to him about before, even when other execs wanted
Speaker 2: to shut those shows down. And he has been a
Speaker 2: visionary for television programming and streaming innovations for over thirty years.
Speaker 2: That's right, Kevin has his hand in so many shows,
Speaker 2: including The Sopranos, The Shield, Nip Tuck, Thirty Rock, The Office,
Speaker 2: and so many more. I'm excited for you to hear
Speaker 2: his story, his career path, and also his take on
Speaker 2: the writers an actors strike that's going on right now.
Speaker 2: Of course I stand with my guild, but I know
Speaker 2: for a fact that unless both sides talk to and
Speaker 2: understand each other, we're not going to get anywhere. So
Speaker 2: it's really special and important to me that Kevin and
Speaker 2: I got to have this conversation at this particular point
Speaker 2: in time. I learned a lot, and I think you
Speaker 2: will too. So how listen. Here he is my old
Speaker 2: and dear friend, Kevin Riley.
Speaker 3: Bubble and squeak. I love it, Bubble and squeak. I know,
Speaker 3: bubble and squeak. I cook get every month, lift over
Speaker 3: from the.
Speaker 4: Ninetyfore, what's up, Kevin?
Speaker 1: There's the man. How's it going outstanding? Good to see you, buddy.
Speaker 2: It's great to see you. We still haven't golfed.
Speaker 1: I know I'm gonna We're gonna will very soon.
Speaker 2: Yes, my golf game is in shambles right now. So
Speaker 2: if perfect your perfect part, yeah exactly, you're uh yeah.
Speaker 2: If if you like to play for money, now's a
Speaker 2: good time to get me. How well, I would say,
Speaker 2: how's it going?
Speaker 1: I can't believe it's been three years since. Uh, that's
Speaker 1: a little scary.
Speaker 2: Actually, I know. Well, time stops during COVID for sure.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it was Oh that was like the timing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the timing. You know. I don't have one
Speaker 1: of those brains that can do chronology, you know how
Speaker 1: some people can just go, oh and in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, I did this and do that. I can't
Speaker 1: do that to begin with. But once you threw COVID
Speaker 1: into the mix I have, I'm like, wheels off. People go, hey,
Speaker 1: when did you start that thing? I go, I can't
Speaker 1: do it.
Speaker 2: I know, I was just I was just doing it myself.
Speaker 2: Think anytime it's like, you know, oh I went somewhere,
Speaker 2: I was in a city, I did this thing. How
Speaker 2: long ago was that? Oh that was like two years ago. Oh,
Speaker 2: in the middle of COVID. No, I guess it was
Speaker 2: seven years ago. That's that's that's what happens. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's been three years. We had such a great conversation,
Speaker 2: but you know, we were really focused on the office
Speaker 2: during that time. And you have such an interesting it's crazy, like,
Speaker 2: of all of my shows, like my favorite shows since
Speaker 2: two thousand, almost all of them you had your you
Speaker 2: had you were involved in one way or the other,
Speaker 2: and truly like change, the face of television changed in
Speaker 2: some ways, how people consumed. We'll talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about that during your time in blocks or used to consume. Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: but even so, you know how people consume and and
Speaker 2: and what they were consuming on different networks. So I'm
Speaker 2: I'm really excited to talk to you and then talk
Speaker 2: a little bit about what's going on in the industry
Speaker 2: right now. But going back for you, you grew up in
Speaker 2: Long Island, right in New York. Were you a New
Speaker 2: York kid? Like, were you taking advantage of this city?
Speaker 1: And yeah, but you know when you you know, when
Speaker 1: you grow up outside New York City, if you're not
Speaker 1: in New York City, there's just a hard line differentiator
Speaker 1: between a city kid and a Long Island kid, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, especially if you're a condescending New York kid,
Speaker 1: You're like, you're from where you know? So yeah, it
Speaker 1: was twenty minutes without traffic, two hours with traffic, So no,
Speaker 1: I kind of would go into the city. I mean,
Speaker 1: I had I had my best friend growing up as
Speaker 1: his father managed the New York Athletic Club, which was
Speaker 1: like a just an institution, and he was a kid
Speaker 1: who was just like he was the fourth child, and
Speaker 1: at that point the parents were like, you know, wheels off.
Speaker 1: They were great family, but he just got so I
Speaker 1: just I would go in with him and we would
Speaker 1: have these crazy adventures where we'd ended up being extras
Speaker 1: in a movie. We'd go under the stanchion at a
Speaker 1: crime scene. I mean, we had some crazy adventures in
Speaker 1: New York City, but no, I was not a city, right.
Speaker 2: What were your favorite television shows as a kid. What
Speaker 2: do you remember watching?
Speaker 1: Oh shit, I had a wild swath of things. I
Speaker 1: mean when I was a little kid, lost in space somehow,
Speaker 1: I just like I was in syndication. I mean, I
Speaker 1: hate to say it, but I'm so fucking old that
Speaker 1: it was like the still the three channel universe. And
Speaker 1: I would just sit there, changing the channel and staring
Speaker 1: at this before dinner.
Speaker 2: Every night.
Speaker 1: My mother would be like.
Speaker 2: Turn that thing off, right right?
Speaker 1: But I like watch you know, I watched I Love
Speaker 1: Lucy reruns with my mother, you know, I mean I
Speaker 1: got laugh in. I got to stay up and watch
Speaker 1: Goldie Hawn in a bikini, and I was like, Wow,
Speaker 1: this this thing is cool. I didn't even like something
Speaker 1: there's something going on with this show. Like generationally, that
Speaker 1: was a whole different kind of thing. And then when
Speaker 1: I got into sort of the Monty Python kind of age,
Speaker 1: I just found those guys were seminal influence to me.
Speaker 2: Did you watch Saturday Night Live as a kid?
Speaker 1: Yes, And that was probably one of the coolest things
Speaker 1: when I finally when I I went back to be
Speaker 1: the president of NBC, and I became friends with Lauren
Speaker 1: and I still am and like an actual friend of Lauren's.
Speaker 1: We kind of bonded over thirty Rock in particular, which
Speaker 1: was you know, Tina Fey was really one of Lauren's favorites,
Speaker 1: and she was not only the head writer, but you know,
Speaker 1: it became a really significant thing. So when I actually
Speaker 1: got to sit in the booth with Louren down in
Speaker 1: studio at eight h and I was like, man, if
Speaker 1: you told me when I was a kid, because I was, look,
Speaker 1: I was right at that age where it was just
Speaker 1: a groundbreaking thing. And I would have to remember running
Speaker 1: home to watch Saturday Live at eleven thirty, you know,
Speaker 1: at just that prime age of whatever the hell I
Speaker 1: was in my teens, and I was like, this is it?
Speaker 1: So sort of on some level. Those were kind of
Speaker 1: where I decided I have no idea what this is.
Speaker 1: I don't know even know how you get into that business.
Speaker 1: I don't have a clue. But that's I really knew
Speaker 1: back then that's what I wanted to do somehow.
Speaker 2: You wanted to be involved in television.
Speaker 1: Just entertainment, Yeah, I mean television, but know it was
Speaker 1: just like I wanted, I want in on whatever that is.
Speaker 1: And I came out to California to visit Disneyland with
Speaker 1: my parents when I was in sixth grade, and I
Speaker 1: was like, I guess this is where they make movies
Speaker 1: and things, and there's palm trees here. I just was like,
Speaker 1: note to self, I'm doing this and coming here and
Speaker 1: I it was a long, windy, twisty road and I
Speaker 1: didn't and I was clueless on that road, but I
Speaker 1: figured it out.
Speaker 2: It's funny because similar and then for me it really
Speaker 2: happened later. But you know, when I was traveling around
Speaker 2: the country doing theater, I remember visiting for the and
Speaker 2: I had, you know, a friend of a friend who
Speaker 2: was friends with Callista Flockhart, and I got invited to
Speaker 2: come out for a Midsummer Night's dream. I guess was
Speaker 2: the movie Calista Flockhart was. And I came out and
Speaker 2: I was staying near Westwood, and there was this thing
Speaker 2: called Coffee Bean where everyone sat outside so exotic in
Speaker 2: the sun. Yeah, drank freezy drinks and fade donald when
Speaker 2: you learned.
Speaker 1: Then that in La somehow there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: that seem to have no cares in the world, and
Speaker 1: they're sitting around in the middle of the day drinking coffee.
Speaker 2: They're sing around.
Speaker 1: I don't know who these people are, but.
Speaker 2: You know, well, I thought it would just happened once
Speaker 2: you got there. Yeah, and yeah, it was like exactly, like,
Speaker 2: no to self, I don't need to be freezing myself
Speaker 2: in Minnesota. Yeah for that much longer. Let's move out here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you went to Cornell, I did.
Speaker 1: Speaking of freezing your ass off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so when you were at Cornell, were you thinking
Speaker 2: about being involved in entertainment.
Speaker 1: Yes, I still had no clue what it was. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: I became a communications major thinking that was somehow gonna impact.
Speaker 1: I took classes. I took screenwriting classes at if A College,
Speaker 1: which actually had sort of a legit program, And uh,
Speaker 1: I think about it now because it's pre Google, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't even know how anybody figured out anything.
Speaker 1: I mean, it does make you be crafty, but you'd
Speaker 1: have to go get a few of the books that
Speaker 1: were written, or you'd maybe some magazines would be stuff.
Speaker 1: So I'm gleaning whatever I could. But the one couple
Speaker 1: things I did well, which is I just I had
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure. I mean, everyone I grew up
Speaker 1: with ended up in somehow Wall Street, if you will,
Speaker 1: whether they were a trader or if they had bigger brains,
Speaker 1: they became an investment banker. And everybody kind of did that.
Speaker 1: And a lot of guys that you graduated had job
Speaker 1: offers and their acceptance letters on the wall. I didn't.
Speaker 1: I I tended bar. I was like, I better go
Speaker 1: pay the bills because my father, who did not support
Speaker 1: this career choice to begin with, was definitely not going
Speaker 1: to support it and support me. So I just tended bar.
Speaker 1: That's what I went to do. Well. I went to
Speaker 1: some programs at NYU and just ran around New York
Speaker 1: City from one my parents house in Long Island, trying
Speaker 1: to figure out who would give me a break.
Speaker 2: You talked about taking a screenwriting class. Did you ever
Speaker 2: see yourself as a writer or as an actor.
Speaker 1: Yes, I didn't really understand. I just knew I loved
Speaker 1: it all, and there were moments of kind of having
Speaker 1: my toe in each kind of pond a little bit,
Speaker 1: you know. Acting I moved away from pretty quickly because
Speaker 1: I just was like, I had actor friends. I loved it,
Speaker 1: but I was like, boy, I don't I don't think
Speaker 1: I can do this, you know, the job of being
Speaker 1: the actor, you know, not the craft, the job part
Speaker 1: of it. I just like, man, I just don't think
Speaker 1: I have that kind of personality. And it scared me.
Speaker 1: It probably scared me too much, you know, because my
Speaker 1: parents just were not Look there were great people, they
Speaker 1: just didn't get that at all. And the writing I
Speaker 1: had more discipline on. But then I kind of went
Speaker 1: the same route. I was like, man, I just spent
Speaker 1: two and a half years years in New York. I
Speaker 1: don't think I ever slept. I was on the I
Speaker 1: was carrying coffee on the sets of commercials, music videos.
Speaker 1: I did like one hundred and fifty of them. I
Speaker 1: mean literally didn't sleep. There were times I would get
Speaker 1: home at two in the morning and be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need to be back on set at five, I've
Speaker 1: got to catch the train. I would set a clock
Speaker 1: and literally put it on my chest and sleep for
Speaker 1: forty five minutes and wake up and throw coffee in
Speaker 1: my face and go back to work. So it was
Speaker 1: all kind of a blur. But I did some writing,
Speaker 1: but I was by the time I got to California,
Speaker 1: where I just packed my car and winged it and
Speaker 1: drove across country with no month, like literally eight hundred
Speaker 1: dollars to my name, which I spent very quickly. I
Speaker 1: just think I didn't have the guts, frankly, to say,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm going to be a writer. I was like,
Speaker 1: I'll I need something that's gonna if I get a job,
Speaker 1: will pay me in the short run. And I had
Speaker 1: regret about that for a number of years, where I
Speaker 1: kept beating myself up for being a sellout, you know.
Speaker 1: And then I finally was like, well, if there's then
Speaker 1: go right, you know. And then I was like, gave that.
Speaker 1: I was like, move on.
Speaker 2: I did not know you drove. You just packed up
Speaker 2: the car and went to LA I know that fairly quickly, right.
Speaker 2: You ended up at Universal As on the public.
Speaker 1: Side, And when I was driving across country. I drove
Speaker 1: the southern route and I stayed with some a bunch
Speaker 1: of college friends along the way and in Atlanta, actually,
Speaker 1: I stayed with a guy who was in the hotel
Speaker 1: business and his roommate was in the hotel business, and
Speaker 1: he gave me a name of a guy. He's like, look,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know what this guy does if
Speaker 1: he's at Universal Pictures, and he puts actors in my hotel,
Speaker 1: in our hotel when he comes to town. He's a
Speaker 1: nice guy. And then I like him, you should you know,
Speaker 1: here's his name. And I was like, oh, I have contacts,
Speaker 1: you know, I know Flockharts, second friends, Nanny, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to you know, yeah, exactly, so my contacts I
Speaker 1: like through that thing in my suitcase. And when I
Speaker 1: got to LA and all the people who said call
Speaker 1: me when you get here didn't return my phone calls,
Speaker 1: and I was in a cold panic and like seriously
Speaker 1: running out of money, and then out of money, I
Speaker 1: like dug out that number and I called this guy Universal,
Speaker 1: who was a nice guy, and I had a meeting.
Speaker 1: He didn't hire me, but a few months later, when
Speaker 1: I was really starting a panic out of the Blue.
Speaker 1: He just called me up and just was like, hey,
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're doing, but we got this job.
Speaker 1: He was in marketing, and I didn't ever really want
Speaker 1: to be in marketing, but he said, look, it's in
Speaker 1: publicity and promotion on you kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: number two person on the West Coast overseeing that part
Speaker 1: of it for us in the in the you know,
Speaker 1: feature film business, you know, would you be interested? And
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, yeah, let me just check with
Speaker 1: my people. Sure, yeah, I think I could squeeze that in.
Speaker 1: So that was just like a huge breakout of the blue,
Speaker 1: which was really me driving stopping in Atlanta to go
Speaker 1: to Hooters with my idiot friend from Cornell and in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: So that's how I got it.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And then one year later, I mean I did that.
Speaker 1: I really was. It was a very interesting experience, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be in marketing. I want to
Speaker 1: be in the creative ent. And then I had just,
Speaker 1: through a bunch of weird connections, kind of wangled my
Speaker 1: way into a dialogue at NBC. And I remember I was,
Speaker 1: you know, I was young at that time. I was
Speaker 1: still going out at night during midweek and I remember
Speaker 1: we'd have these long, boring meetings, like three hour staff meetings,
Speaker 1: and I kept falling asleep in them. And one day
Speaker 1: the head of the department of the marketing department like
Speaker 1: threw a ball of paper at me while I was asleep,
Speaker 1: and I woke up and she goes after the meeting,
Speaker 1: she goes, can I see you? And she said, look,
Speaker 1: you're really bright, and I have no doubt that if
Speaker 1: you stuck with this, you would run this department someday.
Speaker 1: But if you don't get your head into it, I'm
Speaker 1: going to fire you. And the problem was I was
Speaker 1: interviewing crazily to get out of this job and then
Speaker 1: kind of phoning it in and sort of lost interest
Speaker 1: in it even though thank god I had it. And
Speaker 1: literally two days later I got offered a job at NBC,
Speaker 1: and I went in and just told her, like, you
Speaker 1: know what, we're on the same page. I'm quitting.
Speaker 2: So and that was that walking into NBC for the
Speaker 2: first time. Yeah, was there a feeling like was it
Speaker 2: like I've made it, mom?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, you just I think, like anything in life,
Speaker 1: I mean, for me, those seminal moments when their actual happened,
Speaker 1: even down to like having children, like you're just sort
Speaker 1: of like somewhere between overwhelmed in the moment or just like, oh,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm doing this now, you know, I'm right,
Speaker 1: I guess this is happening. But then you do have
Speaker 1: this moment, and quite often it would be to me
Speaker 1: be you know, when you were busy during the day
Speaker 1: or look I was, you know, half panicked. You're a
Speaker 1: young person, You're slightly into your head. You can't believe
Speaker 1: you even have this job, your busiest shit. A lot
Speaker 1: of times it was like at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the still things about la when
Speaker 1: the sun's setting and it's just temperature's really nice. I'd
Speaker 1: walk out and you're driving off the lot and you're like, huh.
Speaker 1: You know, I remember watching like for me on the
Speaker 1: NBC lot. It was usually guests leaving as I was
Speaker 1: like driving off the lot, guests leaving from their taping
Speaker 1: of the Tonight Show. So you know, Jay Leno would
Speaker 1: do the Tonight Show. It's still Johnny Carson in those days,
Speaker 1: and they you know, would tape from five to seven
Speaker 1: or whatever it was, and when the guests you see
Speaker 1: the limos and you sometimes you'd see them loading up
Speaker 1: in their car and we're driving out together, and those
Speaker 1: are the moments where I was like, cool, I guess
Speaker 1: all right, I'm actually in the real deal here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It is.
Speaker 2: There is that like evening time sun is going down,
Speaker 2: like the air it does, it feels different, and if
Speaker 2: you sort of transport yourself to your younger self thinking
Speaker 2: about it, and there's like you know, and then you
Speaker 2: get stuck in traffic on you know, yeah that's Burbank
Speaker 2: Boulevard or whatever for an hour and.
Speaker 1: A half, streaching halt. Literally, Oh, you're like.
Speaker 2: But there there are those moments where you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is what this is what I think I.
Speaker 1: Have a memory of, specifically early on on my thing,
Speaker 1: driving down Sunset Boulevard. I had put all of the
Speaker 1: money I had on the East Coast saved up into
Speaker 1: this used BMW with one hundred and ten thousand miles
Speaker 1: on it, because I was like, I need a car
Speaker 1: that's not going to I mean, even though it was
Speaker 1: all those things were built like you know, they could
Speaker 1: go forever if you took care of them, and it
Speaker 1: was in such awesome shape, and this was the only
Speaker 1: thing I had. I remember driving down Sunset Boulevard with
Speaker 1: the Palm Tree silhouetted and going like, oh man, here
Speaker 1: it is the Disneyland thing that I envisioned, you know,
Speaker 1: still sort of alive and well, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So you get hired well by Brandon Tartakoff, first
Speaker 2: manager of Creative Affairs, then the VP of Drama Development.
Speaker 2: Talk to me a little bit about your relationship with Tartakoff. Close.
Speaker 1: Good, Yeah, I mean this is a guy like I
Speaker 1: don't you know, I don't know who would be listening
Speaker 1: this out there, but it's some either. You know, this
Speaker 1: was a guy at a time when guys who ultimately
Speaker 1: held the button of like there were you know, three
Speaker 1: doors to access the television world and then only maybe
Speaker 1: four meaningful ways to act, you know, to truly access
Speaker 1: the film world. So if you had one of those
Speaker 1: chairs that kind of opened one of those doors, it
Speaker 1: was a really influential position. And this guy, at a
Speaker 1: very young age was thought of as a genius in television.
Speaker 1: He had been promoted to the head of it when
Speaker 1: he was a very young guy, and he was both
Speaker 1: intimidating just by virtue of how great he was, but
Speaker 1: I loved him. I mean, like he passed away at
Speaker 1: a really young age. He had fought cancer a number
Speaker 1: of times and eventually gave into it and in his forties,
Speaker 1: I think, so it kind of gave him that James
Speaker 1: Dean sort of status in the business. But he he
Speaker 1: was just a witty guy who loved loved the medium.
Speaker 1: He loved great TV. He loved cheesy, fun entertainment. I
Speaker 1: remember one time I was on a plane and of
Speaker 1: course he was sitting in first class and I went
Speaker 1: past him, and I remember like he sent a little
Speaker 1: like goofy note back to me. He had ripped something
Speaker 1: out of Variety and made like a joke in the
Speaker 1: column and had like twenty people pass it back to me.
Speaker 1: And I was like, holy shit, like this is like
Speaker 1: my boss's boss boss is sending me back his gofy note.
Speaker 1: And I love that about him. So it was a
Speaker 1: cool experience, and you know, cut to it was his
Speaker 1: actual There was times when I would sit in his
Speaker 1: office on the couch, like the fifth one on the
Speaker 1: Someone said to me early on when I was like,
Speaker 1: how do you get into one of his jobs? He
Speaker 1: was a producer, He said, look when I go into
Speaker 1: pitch and I'm pitching tartak cough. There's like six other
Speaker 1: people on the couch drinking evy on. I don't know
Speaker 1: what they all do, but you want to be one
Speaker 1: of those people. And so I was like the sixth
Speaker 1: one down on the couch drinking Evyon. And I remember
Speaker 1: being in his office and going, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: someday I would do this, This would be cool to
Speaker 1: do this. And when I finally did, many years later,
Speaker 1: get that actual job in his actual office, that hadn't
Speaker 1: really changed much at all. Even with the Bank of
Speaker 1: there were like eight televisions in a row. It used
Speaker 1: to be three, and then they added to the Minimore
Speaker 1: Networks right right, And I always thought that was cool.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh man, he's got all day long, three
Speaker 1: things running all at once so we can watch what's
Speaker 1: happening with the competition. And then when I got there,
Speaker 1: that was a you know, cool moment too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think I realized. I mean, I know
Speaker 2: that I knew at some point that he died that young.
Speaker 2: But it's like, if you talk about NBC in the past,
Speaker 2: you talk about Tartakoff like his name exists, Like yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's James Dean or Kennedy or
Speaker 2: any of those sort of leaders that unfortunately leave us
Speaker 2: too soon. And and yeah, has that sort of lore
Speaker 2: yet forty eight?
Speaker 1: I just go to a forty.
Speaker 2: Forty eight Wow. Yeah, while you were there during this time,
Speaker 2: you developed, I mean cult legendary Saved by the Bell.
Speaker 2: Talk to me about that. Talk to me about how
Speaker 2: Saved by the Bell came about.
Speaker 1: Well, I worked with at the studio. So this idea
Speaker 1: that used to be illegal. There were anti trust laws
Speaker 1: that prevented the networks from also producing their own things,
Speaker 1: so we would just commission from outside studios like Universal
Speaker 1: Television would produce the show for NBC. Those things were
Speaker 1: starting to evolve, and I was on the very first
Speaker 1: iteration of NBC Studios that became sort of their in house.
Speaker 1: So that is how I really got to know Brandon
Speaker 1: because there were only three employees at NBC Studios my
Speaker 1: second year at the company, which was Brandon, my boss,
Speaker 1: Leslie Lurie, and me. So I really did get to
Speaker 1: work with him even closer at a young age. And
Speaker 1: we were producing this show called Good Morning, Miss Bliss,
Speaker 1: about a group of kids in school with Haley Mills,
Speaker 1: who was a famous actress from back in the day,
Speaker 1: and she was I don't know, in their late sixties
Speaker 1: at this point. Inter thing. It was for the Disney Channel.
Speaker 1: We weren't even producing it for NBC. They canceled it.
Speaker 1: It was not good, and Brandon was like, take that,
Speaker 1: the cocky blonde kid, these other two girls and the
Speaker 1: funny nerdy kid, figure out what it is, and we're
Speaker 1: going to do it ourselves and make it ahead and
Speaker 1: shove it down their throats. So that was like Brandon's competitiveness,
Speaker 1: Like they canceled his thing, and now he was going
Speaker 1: to turn into a hit. And Peter Engel, who I'm
Speaker 1: going to text right now, who God bless him is
Speaker 1: still going and strong in his eighties, who created it
Speaker 1: is a one of just a great inspired nut. It
Speaker 1: was my show. I was given this thing. We even
Speaker 1: cooked up the title on a phone call one day
Speaker 1: of like, I was like, what is this thing about?
Speaker 1: What is it? And Peter's head writer at the time,
Speaker 1: I was like, look, this shouldn't be about school when
Speaker 1: you're in school. It's about what happens when you're out
Speaker 1: of school. And this guy Tom Tender, who had said, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, like say by the Bell, and Peter was like,
Speaker 1: that's a great title, and U and that that was
Speaker 1: the and so on my first year I worked on
Speaker 1: this thing, and I was sort of depressed, to be
Speaker 1: honest with you, because I was like, I spending all
Speaker 1: of my time doing this thing, and all the primetime
Speaker 1: people are putting up all these really you know, we're
Speaker 1: working on like Seinfeld and things that became like institutions,
Speaker 1: and I'm doing this Saturday morning live action kids thing
Speaker 1: that no one gives a crap about. Cut to like
Speaker 1: five hundred episodes later, the thing became an institution, and
Speaker 1: it was intended for like, at the time, tweens watching
Speaker 1: Saturday morning TV, which is like one of the only
Speaker 1: things you had. It was like very few choices when
Speaker 1: you woke up. And when what we never realized was
Speaker 1: like a whole generation of college kids, you know, of
Speaker 1: that age would wake up and kind of you know,
Speaker 1: shake off their Friday night by vegging out watching this show.
Speaker 1: And it became kind of a cult thing. And I
Speaker 1: cannot tell you to this day how strong that thing is.
Speaker 2: I mean, God still alive and well, well yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean it's it's as you say, cult, but yeah, it
Speaker 2: became an institution. I did they really do five hundred episodes?
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 1: Well? They did a couple of spin offs then of right, okay,
Speaker 1: California Dreaming, Dreamings or whatever they called. They did a
Speaker 1: fusee iterations, but it was it was in the hundreds,
Speaker 1: all in in the franchise.
Speaker 2: You also during that time developed Er Network, and you
Speaker 2: supervised the first season of Law and Order. I mean
Speaker 2: these are legendary primetime television shows, both going over twenty seasons.
Speaker 2: So I guess they let you off of the Saturday
Speaker 2: morning event.
Speaker 1: They did they did, yeah, yeah, then I kind of
Speaker 1: came back and did that again. Crazy. You know, the
Speaker 1: success squeaks its three through in weird ways, you know,
Speaker 1: like we went through in the Office, where you know,
Speaker 1: a super impactful generational show barely squeaked its way through life.
Speaker 1: I mean that was my experience more often than not.
Speaker 1: I mean Law and Order, which is now thought of
Speaker 1: as like this insane institution. You know, for a lot
Speaker 1: of listeners are probably like, yeah, my mother's watched it forever,
Speaker 1: But at the time it was this very novel thing.
Speaker 1: Dramas were not selling into syndication because nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: buy one hour shows, so Dick Wolf literally designed it
Speaker 1: as two half hour shows originally that we're going to
Speaker 1: do the Law and the Order, but then they could
Speaker 1: be joined on the first run on television, but then
Speaker 1: they would be syndicated separately. NBC bought this show not
Speaker 1: because they wanted this. This was Dick's like big show,
Speaker 1: but they wanted his hit show, which was going to
Speaker 1: be a thing called Nasty Boys, which was these guys
Speaker 1: with a souped up boat and they were a squad
Speaker 1: that came in in masks and they seized your property
Speaker 1: for drug raids and things, and when they did, they
Speaker 1: got to keep it. So they had super cool motorcycles
Speaker 1: and boats. And it was not a good show. And
Speaker 1: I'm working on I'm, you know, now, only a couple
Speaker 1: of years into my career, and they kind of gave
Speaker 1: them to me in this and I oversaw them and
Speaker 1: everybody's like, how's Nasty Boys going. I was like, you
Speaker 1: know this thing, Law and Order is like really, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's talk about Nasty Boys. So Nasty Boys aired, I
Speaker 1: think it like came and went in less than one season,
Speaker 1: and Law and Order was not a huge hit of
Speaker 1: the gate, but was always a very kind of groundbreaking
Speaker 1: show at the time in terms of its rhythms and
Speaker 1: the kind of the hour. It was one of the
Speaker 1: early shows that talked took policing as police was kind
Speaker 1: of talking about a job, you know, like guys would
Speaker 1: be there like you know, talking about their donuts and
Speaker 1: sort of stepping over the body, not like the old
Speaker 1: cops who were like, we just solve this case, you know,
Speaker 1: which was like the old school way, like they're like, yeah, look,
Speaker 1: we see a lot of this stuff. And you know,
Speaker 1: witnesses weren't cooperative and lawyers had to make deals, and
Speaker 1: it was those were like kind of a step forward.
Speaker 1: And then you know, that was an institution. And then
Speaker 1: Er was a similar kind of thing where it was
Speaker 1: when it was screened, it was in the screening room
Speaker 1: from the powers. It'd be were like, we don't get it.
Speaker 2: Right. Talk to me a little bit. Because those two
Speaker 2: shows I consider at least differently what people refer to
Speaker 2: as procedurals. Yeah, and then there's what's the opposite.
Speaker 1: Of that, Well, there were serialized shows, so two different things.
Speaker 1: So the procedural means a closed ended thing, you know,
Speaker 1: and That's one of the reasons that Law and Order
Speaker 1: had such incredible staying power. You didn't need to see
Speaker 1: season one, you didn't need to bing season five to
Speaker 1: catch up. You just you could drop into any episode
Speaker 1: a body dropped in the beginning, and the crime was solved.
Speaker 1: At the end, case closed, and they've done I don't
Speaker 1: know at this point, between the franchise of all the
Speaker 1: different iterations, I don't know how many hundreds of episodes,
Speaker 1: thousands maybe at this point. But a serial show, which
Speaker 1: Er was, and many other great shows and many of
Speaker 1: the biggest shows today are you know, it's an ongoing storyline. Now.
Speaker 1: You had procedural elements in Er, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: the the medical cases would close, you know, come on,
Speaker 1: stat get on the thing coming away with somebody's gonna
Speaker 1: lose She's gonna.
Speaker 2: Lose the baby.
Speaker 1: You know, oh great, at the end of the thing
Speaker 1: they saved the baby, like so all right, so that's closed.
Speaker 1: But the ongoing soap opera part of it, if you will,
Speaker 1: would go on sometimes the whole season, right, and then
Speaker 1: you had to kind of catch up, and you know,
Speaker 1: it was really weird. You know, it was a very
Speaker 1: sticky way of watching television. But you think about it now,
Speaker 1: there was no catchup or binge device. You had to
Speaker 1: just kind of watch to stay.
Speaker 2: You had to watch for you on the network side,
Speaker 2: how do you make those decisions if you're going to
Speaker 2: pick up, are you looking for a balance of both
Speaker 2: that you might be able to sell later on or
Speaker 2: how are those decisions made?
Speaker 1: You know, the business is just so radically different now.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously with the ability to bringe something and
Speaker 1: watch at your own pace and start from the beginning
Speaker 1: with streaming. You know, when you had a one way
Speaker 1: situation where it was a day and date, like it's
Speaker 1: on Tuesday at nine and you have to watch it
Speaker 1: Tuesday at nine and it may repeat somewhere down the road,
Speaker 1: but that it would be your only opportunity to watch.
Speaker 1: I think generationally you explain that to people, and it's
Speaker 1: like trying to explain the telegraph. You know, you're like,
Speaker 1: what why would you do that? Like this and buggy
Speaker 1: thing like that sounds ridiculous. And what was crazy is
Speaker 1: the statistic of viewers somebody who viewed them. I used
Speaker 1: to hear the statistic all the time, even somebody considered
Speaker 1: this self a viewer. Statistically would watch one out of
Speaker 1: six episodes, So I don't know how anybody followed anything,
Speaker 1: but it was a lot of things went into it
Speaker 1: of like you know, still serialized shows did not repeat
Speaker 1: well at all because you just were it was just
Speaker 1: really hard to jump in and randomly see an episode
Speaker 1: and we're like, wait, when did they split up? You know,
Speaker 1: I missed that episode. I don't even know what's going on.
Speaker 1: Really dent shows, you know, like I mean, look the
Speaker 1: early seminal shows like A Hill Street Blues that really
Speaker 1: started multiple storylines going at the same time over the
Speaker 1: course of a season really made them big impact. But
Speaker 1: for a day and date experience, it was always a
Speaker 1: little harder to program those things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, now that tends to be the norm because
Speaker 1: it's highly addictive. As you know, when you're when you're
Speaker 1: into a storyline, it feels like you just got to
Speaker 1: keep watching, watching, to the point of a binge.
Speaker 2: Today, why did you leave NBC and go to Borlstein Gray?
Speaker 1: I had just sort of gotten the network had gone
Speaker 1: through a roller coaster of being the top and then
Speaker 1: kind of getting beat up and having some management changes,
Speaker 1: and it just felt like time to make a change.
Speaker 1: I you know, the Tartakoff had left at that point.
Speaker 1: He hadn't passed on, but he had left. It was
Speaker 1: it was not being that much fun. I was getting frustrated.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, as a young guy, I to the
Speaker 1: extent I've made any reputations in the business, I always
Speaker 1: felt like I wanted to reach forward, like you were saying,
Speaker 1: curious about what people were watching and what they wanted
Speaker 1: to watch differently than what was on. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a tendency in general for people to want to do
Speaker 1: what they've seen before, and in television it wasn't that
Speaker 1: much desire. You know, the old Guard to a large
Speaker 1: degree kind of wanted to just serve up the same
Speaker 1: aversion of the same thing they'd done a million times before.
Speaker 1: I was always like, what's next, What's new? And I
Speaker 1: could feel generationally that this thing was really changing. I
Speaker 1: mean that's how some of these shows like Er that
Speaker 1: were like what do you mean the patient dies and
Speaker 1: the doctor's making what do you mean the doctors are
Speaker 1: making jokes while they've got somebody's chest open, the bullet
Speaker 1: with a bullet wound, Like that's you know, that's not
Speaker 1: what the heroes do. What do you mean, a bad
Speaker 1: guy is the center of a show. These were rules
Speaker 1: you didn't break, and I was always like, well, why
Speaker 1: wouldn't you like that's kind of what the my generation
Speaker 1: I could see the next one wanted, and so I
Speaker 1: was just getting kind of frustrated that this wasn't changing enough.
Speaker 1: So then brill Sen Gray was just this management company
Speaker 1: that had big clients that wanted to go into producing,
Speaker 1: and it seemed like a cool move, and so that's
Speaker 1: what I did.
Speaker 2: While you were there, you worked on many shows, to
Speaker 2: name a few, just shoot Me News Radio, Steve Harvey Show,
Speaker 2: and you also worked on the pilot of this little
Speaker 2: show called The Sopranos. As The Sopranos is happening, are
Speaker 2: you aware of how good it is or what it
Speaker 2: has the potential to be?
Speaker 1: Not initially, because again it was another failure. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was so fascinating to be throughout my career is
Speaker 1: that most of the things that have ended up in
Speaker 1: my resume and my bio were failures that became the successes.
Speaker 1: You know. I mean David Chase, who created it, I
Speaker 1: knew him through you know, David was in his fifties
Speaker 1: at this point, and he had been a one of
Speaker 1: the really fine television writers. He was a rule breaker.
Speaker 1: You know. David's a guy who's always frustrated with this system.
Speaker 1: He wanted to do something more artistic than the formula,
Speaker 1: and he did it to pay the bills, but he
Speaker 1: was always grumbling about it. He's like, I'm doing this
Speaker 1: goddamn thing. So we ended up giving him an overall deal.
Speaker 1: He was always like a new one of the better writers,
Speaker 1: pure writers. And we developed the sopranos for we sold
Speaker 1: it to Fox, and Fox was the upstart network that
Speaker 1: was doing quote unquote edgy stuff, and it went into
Speaker 1: development and it got all the way down the loan
Speaker 1: line and we LaPaglia for a minute was attached as
Speaker 1: Conny's soprano, and we had at least interest from his
Speaker 1: camp and we were going to get it made, and
Speaker 1: then Fox passed on it, and then David was depressed,
Speaker 1: and it kicked around for like two years just as
Speaker 1: a passed on project, and eventually found its way over
Speaker 1: to HBO, who sort of picked it up to redevelop it,
Speaker 1: but pretty much had the same script that we had
Speaker 1: at Fox. It wasn't really written and just took the
Speaker 1: Fox out of it. You know, we took all the
Speaker 1: stuff that you couldn't air on broadcasts and then just
Speaker 1: put it back in right and did a little bit
Speaker 1: more development, and then then they agreed to shoot the
Speaker 1: pilot and went through this casting process of the really
Speaker 1: inspired choice to cast Gandelfini, who was really the opposite
Speaker 1: of a leading man, but you can't conceive of anybody
Speaker 1: else doing that role.
Speaker 2: Yeah, after you shoot the pilot and you see what
Speaker 2: you have, do you see it? Like, are you able
Speaker 2: to see that it's going to change HBO and paid television.
Speaker 1: Our company had done the Larry was doing the Larry
Speaker 1: Sanders Show for it. Okay, so this is early early
Speaker 1: HBO where they did two shows and we produced two
Speaker 1: of them. We did Deaf Comedy Jam, which was actually
Speaker 1: a very big show for them, and then at the
Speaker 1: opposite end of that spectrum the Larry's Sanders Show, which
Speaker 1: was kind of, you know, a coastal show, really smart comedy.
Speaker 1: It was it was a fraction of the audience of
Speaker 1: Death Comedy Jam.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: But so they were HbA always trying to find their
Speaker 1: footing too, and collectively, I think everyone was just sort
Speaker 1: of wading into this thing. So it was clearly the
Speaker 1: pilot was clearly something special. But I will say for me,
Speaker 1: anything I've ever been involved in I thought was good.
Speaker 1: You never go I've never said the words this is
Speaker 1: a hit. You know, you look at it and you go,
Speaker 1: this is first like, this is a thing. There's something here,
Speaker 1: and if we keep doing this, it's gonna be good,
Speaker 1: and if we get a little lucky, it actually will
Speaker 1: be something significant. And that's just the way I've always
Speaker 1: looked at it. I've never been surprised, like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I had no idea that was good. But I've certainly
Speaker 1: been surprised on the downside times. But I've definitely been
Speaker 1: surprised when fine, not pleasantly, like oh my god, they're
Speaker 1: catching on to what we've known for a while. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the pilot was and Chris Albrick at the time, and
Speaker 1: I've told him this story. I went over to screen
Speaker 1: the pilot and he screened it with Carolyn Strausho has
Speaker 1: gone on to produce many great things, most recently The
Speaker 1: Last of Us for HBO, which was incredible and at
Speaker 1: the end, and I told Chris's story, he doesn't even
Speaker 1: recall doing it, but the lights came up and Chris
Speaker 1: literally put his head in his hands and was rubbing
Speaker 1: his eyes and it felt like it felt like five
Speaker 1: minutes of silence, and then he looked up and he
Speaker 1: was like, it's good. It's really good. And I think
Speaker 1: he had to just wrap his hands around like this
Speaker 1: weird thing of where this guy burns down his best
Speaker 1: friend's restaurant and he's wading in a pool with ducks.
Speaker 1: I think he just had to be like, okay, like
Speaker 1: I think we'll do this, and weirdly, the moment where
Speaker 1: you really really felt like it's been written about, but
Speaker 1: there was, I believe the fourth episode because prior to
Speaker 1: that point, Tony had never directly he had circumstantially ordered
Speaker 1: hits or had talked about You knew he had his
Speaker 1: hands and stuff, but you never saw it directly or
Speaker 1: you never you never saw him directly go go kill
Speaker 1: that fucking guy and then somebody's It was indirect a
Speaker 1: lot of times, and that was part of the art
Speaker 1: of it, you know. There was like the presumption like, eh,
Speaker 1: we did what we had to do in the fourth
Speaker 1: I believe it was a fourth episode of that season,
Speaker 1: that seminal episode where he's taken his daughter on a
Speaker 1: college trip and he sees a guy who's right is wrong,
Speaker 1: and he chokes the guy to death with his bare hands.
Speaker 1: And that was that was a you know now where
Speaker 1: everything that's transpired since feels like, well, yeah, what's the
Speaker 1: big deal. But at the time you're like, wait, this
Speaker 1: is the quote unquote hero of our show. It's one
Speaker 1: thing to know he's a bad guy, but he's a
Speaker 1: bad guy who we kind of like, and he likes
Speaker 1: ducks and his mom doesn't treat him well. So we
Speaker 1: were like, but now he is choking someone to death
Speaker 1: with his bare hands. That's a whole different ballgame. Like
Speaker 1: people going to just go I'm out, Like I'm out,
Speaker 1: I can't get behind this guy. And it was a
Speaker 1: huge debate, and HBO, to their credit, this was the
Speaker 1: early days of them forming their DNA, basically said okay,
Speaker 1: well back you. I mean they first were freaking out,
Speaker 1: but they agreed to back it, and at that moment
Speaker 1: was when I think a lot of people involved were
Speaker 1: sort of like, Wow, now this thing is really in
Speaker 1: a category of it's and I think many for them
Speaker 1: just galvanize this thing of like you got to see
Speaker 1: the show.
Speaker 2: Right, do you think your experience working on that and
Speaker 2: the success that it had. How much do you think
Speaker 2: that that influenced choices that you made in your career
Speaker 2: once you became the boss later on?
Speaker 1: Hugely influential. I mean it had been building all the
Speaker 1: way up with the number of things you've even just
Speaker 1: referenced of what my playbook and things my reference points
Speaker 1: were were not anything that the same old, same old
Speaker 1: that I now was accumulating touchstones of things where I go, oh,
Speaker 1: here's where we stuck the finger in the eye of
Speaker 1: what you were supposed to do and it worked out great,
Speaker 1: right so creatively in terms of the work, Yes, that
Speaker 1: became a huge north starter.
Speaker 2: You become president of Entertainment at FX at the time
Speaker 2: you transform that network. I mean that network you know
Speaker 2: before you arrived, doing a lot of syndication, shitty, just
Speaker 2: terrible reruns and one of my other favorite shows of
Speaker 2: all time that changed television. It's one thing to have
Speaker 2: a mobster strangle somebody. When you start talking about the
Speaker 2: shield you've you've now got cops who are doing very
Speaker 2: very naughty things. Was your decision and your confidence in
Speaker 2: green lighting that and having that show go? Does that
Speaker 2: come from the Sopranos and the success.
Speaker 1: I just the business of it was that, for all
Speaker 1: of its impact, HBO's audience penetration at the time, there
Speaker 1: was about one hundred and ten million viewing households in
Speaker 1: the country that could get television of some sort. Even
Speaker 1: cable was getting pretty highly penetrated at that point, you know,
Speaker 1: basic cable, but HBO's subscription cable, they were only in
Speaker 1: about twenty eight million homes, so only a fraction of
Speaker 1: the whole country had even gotten to see They may
Speaker 1: have heard of the Sopranos. But I was like Peter
Speaker 1: Legori and I who kind of were in the seats
Speaker 1: at the time. Peter had been at HBO as a
Speaker 1: marketing executive. His history was not as creative. I came
Speaker 1: over there and we basically said, let's get as close
Speaker 1: as we can to HBO on basic cable. You know,
Speaker 1: we can't do everything they do, but we're going to
Speaker 1: try to be as sort of finger in your eye
Speaker 1: as possible. And this was written as a spec script,
Speaker 1: as a writing sample. It was given to me by
Speaker 1: and somebody said you should read this. This guy, Sean Ryan,
Speaker 1: is a good writer. And I read it, and I
Speaker 1: met with him, and I said, well, we're going to
Speaker 1: make this, and he goes, what do you mean, And
Speaker 1: I go, we'll make this. He goes like that. I go, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll make this, and he still he couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: He was a young guy, had never run a show.
Speaker 1: And it was truly one of the great experiences of
Speaker 1: my career, just the whole thing it went down. We
Speaker 1: were it was such a ragtag shitty I took a
Speaker 1: pay cut to go to that job. I went from
Speaker 1: these beautiful offices in Beverly Hills with magnificent literally recognizable
Speaker 1: art on the wall and the designer would have to
Speaker 1: approve your furniture choice to the this shithole on Suppulvita Boulevard.
Speaker 1: Literally there was it was shag carpeting from like the eighties.
Speaker 1: There was a giant stain in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: There was a hole. Someone had punched a hole in
Speaker 1: the wall of my office and just hung a picture
Speaker 1: over it, but not it didn't fully cover the hole.
Speaker 1: And so it was just felt like, what this really
Speaker 1: ragtag operation? And we kind of made this thing and
Speaker 1: under the radar, I remember, you know, technically it was
Speaker 1: an ADS supported network. We screened this for advertisers in
Speaker 1: New York, and like dozens of them bolted for the
Speaker 1: door after the lights came up. They like didn't even
Speaker 1: want to look us in the eye. They're like, we're
Speaker 1: not putting. And I remember Donna Speciali, who became I
Speaker 1: worked with for years at Turner, was the head of
Speaker 1: ad sales who I really loved. At the time, she
Speaker 1: was at some I forget what agency was. She was
Speaker 1: a big buyer, and she came up She's like, I
Speaker 1: really like this and I'm gonna watch you guys, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna see how this goes. I'm not putting a
Speaker 1: nickel into this show. And the only the only thing
Speaker 1: that the only advertiser we had was Mike's Hard Lemonade
Speaker 1: on FX. They literally nobody else would touch it but
Speaker 1: Mike's Hard Lemonade. And then we just filled it with
Speaker 1: Mattress King commercials and a bunch of shitty local stuff,
Speaker 1: right nobody, you know, that stuff was too too edgy
Speaker 1: for them to put any advertising in. But that was
Speaker 1: like the foundational DNA for the network. And I recently
Speaker 1: caught up and Binge the Bear. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you saw it. I loved it. Blew me away. I
Speaker 1: thought it was brilliant, and I was like, man, there
Speaker 1: it is some of that same DNA still in that place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in addition to the shield Nip tuck, Rescue Me, Yeah,
Speaker 2: a very very different sort. What is Rescue Me a
Speaker 2: comedy or a drama?
Speaker 1: Yes? I only bought the I bought only bought the
Speaker 1: original script, and then I had transitioned over to NBC.
Speaker 1: I was already in transition. I had the job, and
Speaker 1: I had the in my side pocket, while I in
Speaker 1: my right pocket was kind of Rescue Me, and in
Speaker 1: my left pocket was this thing called the Office that
Speaker 1: I'd be given the tape of that. I was like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm not making that at effects. I'm going
Speaker 1: to NBC.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We talked a lot about the Office being the
Speaker 2: savior of the Office. My name is Earl, which you
Speaker 2: know saved the Office as well. So thank you for
Speaker 2: that one thirty rock Yeah, Friday Night Lights heroes, I mean,
Speaker 2: and then on the unscripted side, Dealer, no deal, America's
Speaker 2: got talent, and many many more. This is incredible. The
Speaker 2: year that you you will you leave again. In two
Speaker 2: thousand and seven, sixty nine Emmy nominations that year across
Speaker 2: all of these shows. It's I mean, it's a huge
Speaker 2: legacy that you left. You leave to go to Fox.
Speaker 2: But talk to me a little bit about that transition
Speaker 2: they for you, do you feel like you got treated unfairly?
Speaker 1: Look at the time, I would say, what was so
Speaker 1: ironic is the four years NBC had really gotten very
Speaker 1: entitled of you know, the landscape was really changing. At
Speaker 1: this point. There were you know, bonafide four networks now
Speaker 1: for you know, about a decade at that point, since
Speaker 1: eighty eight when Fox was founded. Only towards the end
Speaker 1: how they launched this little show called American Idol. So
Speaker 1: Fox was about to go. You know, they had the
Speaker 1: Simpsons and things like that, so it was X files.
Speaker 1: Fox was really a bonafide challenger and always sort of
Speaker 1: did a lot of pounds for a pound of cool
Speaker 1: stuff that I always thought was cool on television. NBC
Speaker 1: had been at the top and gotten you know, on
Speaker 1: the front the er Friends, Seinfeld trifecta was just a juggernaut.
Speaker 1: But it was beginning to you know, Seinfeld had gone off,
Speaker 1: it was coming down. Friends was on its last days.
Speaker 1: Law and Order was still on, but had you know,
Speaker 1: they had all come down to earth and you could
Speaker 1: see the writing on the wall that it was about
Speaker 1: to really go from hanging on to the top to
Speaker 1: being bad, being in trouble. And that's when I joined.
Speaker 1: And I was very naive, thinking, well, I'm just going
Speaker 1: to be the savior of this place and I'll be
Speaker 1: like Brandon Tartakoff, I'll turn it around and everyone will
Speaker 1: tell me I'm a genius. But now we're also fighting
Speaker 1: a broader environment. You know where it's the beginning the
Speaker 1: early early stages of digital consumption generationally. You know this
Speaker 1: idea of watching day and day, and I know this
Speaker 1: in my gut. I'm like broadcast television in my mind,
Speaker 1: is in its last breadths of dominance. It's but I
Speaker 1: was like, everybody's got to face the facts that NBC,
Speaker 1: the juggernaut, that of what it was of turning on
Speaker 1: must see TV Thursday night, those days are not coming back.
Speaker 1: And I just felt like it needed to be rebuilt
Speaker 1: from the ground up with really cool stuff that the
Speaker 1: next generation wanted to watch. Even if Grant Tinker early
Speaker 1: in his career, who was Brandon Tartakoff's boss, he at
Speaker 1: the time when they rebuilt it way back in a
Speaker 1: different era had this expression saying, first, be best, then
Speaker 1: be first, And I always love that, and I always
Speaker 1: thought it was really meaningful. First, be best, then be first.
Speaker 1: When you're a first place network, that means billions of dollars,
Speaker 1: that means profits, That means everyone gets big fat bonuses
Speaker 1: and bragging rights. Right when your best but not first
Speaker 1: and have slipped and you're losing starting to lose a
Speaker 1: lot of that money. Not so fun on the business level.
Speaker 1: We were owned by General Electric at this and ge
Speaker 1: was just used to this little cash machine. Just Seinfeld
Speaker 1: comes and sell, you know, tells jokes at our giant
Speaker 1: retreat to guys who make locomotives and turbines and tractors
Speaker 1: and so cool. And then you know, we were a
Speaker 1: small business in the GEO portfolio, but we paid a
Speaker 1: lot of cash, so it was a fast cycle business.
Speaker 1: You know, when you're making jet engines, that's a big
Speaker 1: capital thing that doesn't pay out for long cycles. You know,
Speaker 1: in television, you have a season and at the end
Speaker 1: of the season, it's like, oh, here's the cash, and
Speaker 1: you can just it's available. It's not tied up in
Speaker 1: this big thing. So they liked us. We were just
Speaker 1: a big cash machine, but all of a sudden when
Speaker 1: it started turning really challenging and cash intensive, not so
Speaker 1: much fun from Fairfield. And you know, as somebody said
Speaker 1: back in the day, they send them guys with the clipboards.
Speaker 1: And when they send the guys with the clipboards there
Speaker 1: to help, you really don't want the help. Like it's
Speaker 1: a bunch of consultants and people going, Brian, how are you?
Speaker 1: How are things?
Speaker 5: So?
Speaker 1: Why would you have done that? Why would you have
Speaker 1: put on that kind of show? For example? People don't
Speaker 1: seem to enjoy and you're trying to tell this like
Speaker 1: walk from Fairfield, Like, first of all, you are a
Speaker 1: tight ass NBA who has zero You don't even you
Speaker 1: have bad loafers on. You certainly don't have a feel
Speaker 1: for fucking culture. Go talk to the jet engine guys,
Speaker 1: because you are not going to fix this place. And
Speaker 1: the building was crawling with those people. So I'm trying
Speaker 1: to put on some of these cool shows only other
Speaker 1: than Heroes, which was a bit of a hit right
Speaker 1: at the gate and kind of a cultural thing, but
Speaker 1: not enough like Friends to single handedly turn the network around.
Speaker 1: And I thought we were doing really cool work but
Speaker 1: to be honest with you, I was getting almost not
Speaker 1: only was I not getting credit, I was getting nothing
Speaker 1: but second guessing. I was rumored to be fired every
Speaker 1: other week. And so again like a really I went
Speaker 1: from this incredible FX thing where it was like the
Speaker 1: most fun thing, but it was three years and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, I had that dream job. I thought
Speaker 1: back at Brandon Tardakoff's desk with the actual thing. And
Speaker 1: even the day I did the job, I got an
Speaker 1: award called the Brandon Tartakoff Award, which was like kind
Speaker 1: of like the best of the best in broadcasting. And
Speaker 1: I went down and got the award in Miami, and
Speaker 1: I kind of told that story like I had the
Speaker 1: day I got it, I had this sinking feeling. I
Speaker 1: sat at his desk, I looked up at the Bank
Speaker 1: of Televisions and I was like, this is fucking cool,
Speaker 1: and I have made a terrible, terrible mistake coming here.
Speaker 1: And so what was awesome is that the shows, the
Speaker 1: stuff we did I was always really proud of, and
Speaker 1: it all then went on to have cultural impact and
Speaker 1: then business impact, like the office that is one of
Speaker 1: the biggest assets in their whole portfolio today but as
Speaker 1: we lived, it didn't start that way, and so you know,
Speaker 1: I was pretty much invited to not do that job
Speaker 1: after four years. And yeah, I was pretty fucking uh
Speaker 1: I was not. I was pretty bent out of shape
Speaker 1: over it all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Fox gladly takes you, yeah.
Speaker 1: Very quickly. Like I was like, oh my god, that's
Speaker 1: what I was doing. I was setting into staff meetings
Speaker 1: and going NBC, I mean Fox, Like, I kept like,
Speaker 1: I'm like, what am I doing back in one of
Speaker 1: these places? They can't believe it?
Speaker 2: Go on to have huge success at Fox Brooklyn nine nine,
Speaker 2: A lot of office folks by the way that you
Speaker 2: you bring over there, Mindy Project, Last New Girl, Glee,
Speaker 2: as well as tons of animated hits. Yeah, of all
Speaker 2: of the show I have a question of all the
Speaker 2: shows that you've done, and don't pander because I'm here,
Speaker 2: what are you the most proud of?
Speaker 1: There's there's different things for different different moments, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean you were you were talking about the Shield
Speaker 1: and that experience of kind of all of a sudden
Speaker 1: making a service, like completely repositioning a service that then
Speaker 1: went from a money losing, irrelevant thing to a profit
Speaker 1: what became kind of a really meaningful brand was and
Speaker 1: we had so much fun. I mean, we were just
Speaker 1: those shows you mentioned, and you know, we won the
Speaker 1: first Primetime Emmy and Golden Globes Awards. I mean when
Speaker 1: Michael Chickliss first got up to take the first Emmy,
Speaker 1: I literally grabbed his arm like what are you doing,
Speaker 1: Like you didn't win, and he was like he looked
Speaker 1: at me and he's like, just go with it, because
Speaker 1: he did win, and everybody was like, what the hell
Speaker 1: is that? So there's experiences like that. I've had, you know,
Speaker 1: moments in other shows, but all kidding aside the experience
Speaker 1: of the office where it was. Look, at that point,
Speaker 1: I had made a decision I'm probably going to get
Speaker 1: fired from this job at some point. I'm hanging on
Speaker 1: by a thread. I am going to just fall on
Speaker 1: my sword for the things I believe in. And somebody
Speaker 1: had given me his advice like the worst thing you
Speaker 1: could do is sell out and do what the bosses
Speaker 1: want you to and then fail. Then you can't even
Speaker 1: look yourself in the mirror. So I was like, if
Speaker 1: they fire me, at least I want to say even
Speaker 1: if they don't work, I want to say, well, I
Speaker 1: put on what I believed because I have that power
Speaker 1: to fight for some things. And the office was just
Speaker 1: I don't know, just from a minute one, I'm like,
Speaker 1: this is this is one of those ones. I'm just
Speaker 1: not giving up on this thing. And then because it
Speaker 1: had like really good people involved and it was such
Speaker 1: a moment in time for all of us. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at our picture here, Brian, when you know,
Speaker 1: at the When we Want Night, we won the Emmy
Speaker 1: and they're hoisting me up, and I love looking at
Speaker 1: that photo, not just because it's it's pure, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, as we know, show business is a is
Speaker 1: a rough and tumble game man, and and everybody's got
Speaker 1: scars to do, you know. I just shared some of mine,
Speaker 1: you know, And but it's in its pure moment when
Speaker 1: the thing happens and it's sort of coming out the
Speaker 1: way you dreamed you And look, some talented people are
Speaker 1: are very complicated. I had a really amazing experience on
Speaker 1: thirty Rock. I adore Tina. She's an incredible talent. Tina
Speaker 1: had a star named Alec Baldwin. Enormously talented guy and
Speaker 1: obviously publicly enormously complicated. And so you know, there's a
Speaker 1: you know, as Lauren said one point after Alec quit
Speaker 1: for the fourteenth time, after he had won the Emmy
Speaker 1: the night before, his agent calls up to say, I
Speaker 1: just have to inform you that Alec is quitting the show,
Speaker 1: which is at this point literally was about the seventh
Speaker 1: and I remember Lauren at the time saying, Alec will
Speaker 1: realize in retrospect it this was a good time, you know,
Speaker 1: And but when you're in it, and this moment of
Speaker 1: this picture I'm literally looking at of my left eye
Speaker 1: over here, is pure joy for people who some of
Speaker 1: whom needed a job and had a great one, and
Speaker 1: others who just realized they were part of something special
Speaker 1: and we got the affirmation. And that just for me,
Speaker 1: and the fact really as it is for you, the
Speaker 1: fact that then it went on to be one of
Speaker 1: those rare shows where like now now you're into like
Speaker 1: kids who weren't even born are at the time we're watching, and.
Speaker 2: I really love it.
Speaker 1: You know. That's that those are really rare at this era,
Speaker 1: and so that's a pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, do you consider yourself a creative.
Speaker 1: Yes, in my heart, I've always had that temperament. I
Speaker 1: think it's why I both succeeded in a certain respect
Speaker 1: would and some of those struggles I will say that
Speaker 1: I had that I'm outlining with the system and the man.
Speaker 1: I just never wanted to be like the bureaucrat suit
Speaker 1: that is just in the suite going like sure thing,
Speaker 1: let's just do that because that's safe and we'll keep
Speaker 1: our jobs. I was always kind of an irritant, and
Speaker 1: I think those who appreciated it, and probably at a
Speaker 1: younger age, I was too much, you know at times,
Speaker 1: you know, they were just they don't want you always
Speaker 1: trying to rock the boat. So you know, that's part
Speaker 1: of what a creative is, you know. And the entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: are a version of that.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 1: They want to press up, they want to do what
Speaker 1: other people haven't done, and they got to kind of
Speaker 1: have a blind belief in their ideas. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: that's where I'm the most comfortable, and that's why I'm look,
Speaker 1: I'm not ever going back to those jobs again. Those
Speaker 1: big executive jobs are behind me.
Speaker 2: Bill Lawrence, co creator of Spence City Scrubs, was quoted
Speaker 2: as saying, every morning, all the writers start the day
Speaker 2: with a cup of coffee talking about what assholes the
Speaker 2: network executives are Kevin seems like one of us enough
Speaker 2: that you find yourself not hating him.
Speaker 1: That's so funny. You know, I've known Bill a long time.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it was literally my neighbor for a
Speaker 1: bunch of years in my house just before this one,
Speaker 1: and I really appreciate hearing that. But he's funny.
Speaker 5: That's perfect Bill.
Speaker 2: We're in a historic moment right now. It's clear whatever
Speaker 2: happens with the resolution of these strikes, both the WGA
Speaker 2: and sag AFTRA, this is going to change entertainment and
Speaker 2: television in many ways. Well, first off, do you believe
Speaker 2: the strike should be happening? Yes?
Speaker 1: And no. I yes because frankly, they're really legitimate issues
Speaker 1: and I really feel for the artist community. But no,
Speaker 1: because it's look, at this moment, it's kind of the
Speaker 1: only mechanism to try to force some sort of change.
Speaker 1: But the landscape of the industry is changed beyond what
Speaker 1: the strike will be able to affect. So while I'd
Speaker 1: like to believe that on the other side of the strike,
Speaker 1: the foundations in place where like we've changed the industry
Speaker 1: for the better and gotten our think it's I've gotten
Speaker 1: divorced I remember my divorce lawyer saying at the time, like,
Speaker 1: no one wins, it's just how much are you willing
Speaker 1: to compromise, So there's not going to be a win.
Speaker 1: It will be a compromise all the way around. And look,
Speaker 1: the unfortunate thing is I've been asked, like even there's
Speaker 1: somebody from New York Times like begging me to come
Speaker 1: on their podcast and talk because I'm like a neutral
Speaker 1: person who understands all the issues here. And I've avoided
Speaker 1: it all because I will shoot my mouth off and
Speaker 1: regret it. But what happened here is that a bus
Speaker 1: rolled into town called Netflix. That everybody got on that
Speaker 1: party bus, and everybody when they were firing money all
Speaker 1: over the place and had this new model my last
Speaker 1: thing as a corporate eriotage, I always felt like, this
Speaker 1: is an unbelievable thing they're building, that's an incredible consumer experience,
Speaker 1: and don't you think this is going to be a
Speaker 1: problem for us? And all the powers that be were like,
Speaker 1: they don't They're gonna go out of business, and they
Speaker 1: kept selling all of our stuff over there. But look,
Speaker 1: I also felt like the artist got on that party bus.
Speaker 1: The irony part of the writers. You know the series
Speaker 1: writers issues right now is it's only ten episodes. You know,
Speaker 1: they don't they don't have big grill bust writers rooms.
Speaker 1: I mean I used to talk to writers who are like,
Speaker 1: why would I come do your network show for twenty two?
Speaker 1: I only have to do ten? At Netflix? This is great.
Speaker 1: You know, they were ordering at like a six to
Speaker 1: one ratio from what so everybody was taking the money
Speaker 1: and having a great old time with Netflix. And Netflix
Speaker 1: uberized the business, you know, they turned it upside down
Speaker 1: for better and worse. And the studios they were on
Speaker 1: the party bus because they were selling We were selling
Speaker 1: them all of our stuff really arrogantly misjudging the impact
Speaker 1: it was going to have, not really getting out ahead
Speaker 1: of like what do we have to do? Should we
Speaker 1: take this thing seriously? What should we do? We just
Speaker 1: thought we could somehow wait it out or wait till
Speaker 1: they die, And yet we were fueling them with our
Speaker 1: stuff by giving them our shows. And the studio leadership
Speaker 1: did almost the worst thing. You know, I said to
Speaker 1: someone the other day, like, let's stick with this somehow.
Speaker 1: Traffic analogy, like if you're going to go through a
Speaker 1: yellow light, you want to kind of go fast enough
Speaker 1: to go through safely through that yellow light before it
Speaker 1: turns red. The worst thing to do is to slow
Speaker 1: down and go slow and then gun it and then
Speaker 1: go through a red light, which is sort of what
Speaker 1: the studios did with streaming. They waited and let this
Speaker 1: thing begin to seriously erode and you could see where
Speaker 1: it was going to erode their business, and then lurched
Speaker 1: into it, further accelerating their problems. And so what we
Speaker 1: have now is a business where the legacy companies have
Speaker 1: underlying issues. Bob Eiger came out a few weeks ago
Speaker 1: and said, these guys don't get it. I mean, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a great look for Bob it certainly, I'm sure
Speaker 1: a moment he regrets having doing it with the Billionaire's
Speaker 1: conference behind him, really a bad look. What he's not
Speaker 1: wrong about, though, is that these this strike is not
Speaker 1: striking against the business we just talked about, this monopolistic
Speaker 1: business that was born almost one hundred years ago that
Speaker 1: we actually got to participate form, Bryan. It's now a
Speaker 1: stressed business that is stretched where the legacy players, the WarnerMedia, Discoveries, NBCUS,
Speaker 1: Paramount who yesterday sold Simon and Schuster and is they're
Speaker 1: gonna start, They're gonna have to strip down the pieces
Speaker 1: of these companies. They're not going to come rocketing back
Speaker 1: in business as usual. And for the most part, the
Speaker 1: digital players are not in our business as we knew it.
Speaker 1: I mean, Amazon, does you know, I'm Apple's doing in
Speaker 1: some really cool shows right now. Last I checked. That's
Speaker 1: not their core business. They sell these things and they
Speaker 1: make trillions of dollars. I mean, they're they're highly profitable
Speaker 1: doing that. So the power basis shifted, how the business
Speaker 1: work is shifting. And when the actors who are robbed
Speaker 1: of their residual payments, which was harder thing that when
Speaker 1: you got a good job that could pay your rent
Speaker 1: for the rest of your life. That I feel for
Speaker 1: the hard You know, I love actors, you know, because
Speaker 1: I mean it's such a beautiful thing, and actors are
Speaker 1: wonderfully naive in terms of like I just want to
Speaker 1: do the work and then like, yeah, I'm okay with it,
Speaker 1: but just like, let me have my let me have
Speaker 1: my checks that come for that work I did. And
Speaker 1: now they get checks for like thirty five cents. But
Speaker 1: in order to report that you have to have transparency
Speaker 1: on the actual usage of the service, which Netflix started
Speaker 1: the game by never reporting any of that, right, and
Speaker 1: they still don't. And unless there becomes more transparency, you're
Speaker 1: not going to really be able to measure. So it
Speaker 1: was imperfect. But we used to have a thing called
Speaker 1: rating and in the box and box office, which were
Speaker 1: measurements of success. Right, those don't exist. So my point
Speaker 1: is it's a much more complicated tapestry. The issues are legit,
Speaker 1: but this strike mechanism. Look, do I think everyone should
Speaker 1: have held hands and together gone, listen, guys, we're all
Speaker 1: in this together with different agendas. But this business, we
Speaker 1: got to figure out a different path forward. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they didn't, you know, they let it get to the
Speaker 1: eleventh hour and then a strike happens. So I think
Speaker 1: the double strike, I think the actors really will together
Speaker 1: force some step forward. But I'd love to say it's
Speaker 1: all going to be fixed. It's not going to be.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, Well, as someone said to me, it's been fifty
Speaker 2: years since the last actors strike. Ronald Reagan was SAG
Speaker 2: president at the time, and the issues were much the
Speaker 2: same as it has been explained to me, which is
Speaker 2: actors sitting around when shows were rerun and saying, why
Speaker 2: people are still enjoying our work? Why are we not
Speaker 2: getting money for that? Yes, and I mean there's other issues,
Speaker 2: and I don't mean to belittle all of them, but
Speaker 2: that there was a negotiated rate that at least everyone
Speaker 2: could except for work that now it doesn't exist. It's interesting,
Speaker 2: it does feel like which I think has been the problem,
Speaker 2: a little bit like trying to put a pin on
Speaker 2: something that keeps moving. That the way things are consumed,
Speaker 2: the way monetization formula could be made. It's all shifting
Speaker 2: so quickly.
Speaker 1: Yes, but also let's not if you really even just
Speaker 1: back up even further in the Ronald Reagan era, even
Speaker 1: up until the Office Area era, where the writing you know,
Speaker 1: as we remember The Office was, if not the first show,
Speaker 1: one of the very early shows onto the iPod. You know,
Speaker 1: when all of a sudden there's a video that could
Speaker 1: be downloaded and streamed legitimately. So let's just use from that,
Speaker 1: you know, the beginning filmed entertainment, whether it was at
Speaker 1: the box office or on your television, was the pinnacle
Speaker 1: of cultural consumption. Like that was what the kids talked about.
Speaker 1: That was the write of pasth you went to the
Speaker 1: movies with your friends, you sat around the television and
Speaker 1: tuned in at eight o'clock at night. Everybody bought Michael
Speaker 1: Jackson's thriller. It was a very almost sort of monopolistic
Speaker 1: kind of environment. The environment today between the gaming world
Speaker 1: and the interactive and all the TikTok and everything pressing
Speaker 1: in from the sides that is highly demanding of your time,
Speaker 1: and then the streaming business that has then upended the
Speaker 1: middle of it. You have something that is a much
Speaker 1: more complicated landscape to manage. So it's true the issues
Speaker 1: are still the same, and at the time, I'm sure
Speaker 1: they had really rational reasons why they weren't. You know,
Speaker 1: you'd be beginning going back to the earlier artist employees
Speaker 1: when well, you worked for us, you were contract players,
Speaker 1: and you did what we did. So then it get no,
Speaker 1: you know what, we're not your employees. We need to
Speaker 1: be paid as our independent contractors of sorts with real rights,
Speaker 1: which is what the unionization helped bring about. They are
Speaker 1: the same fundamental issues, but unfortunately now the ability to
Speaker 1: is not. It's not the five families at the top
Speaker 1: that just say all right, once I waived this wand
Speaker 1: it just is fixed. They're public companies under tremendous stress
Speaker 1: that their growth engine is highly compromised. That's not clear
Speaker 1: what's really driving these companies forward. They're very big, probably
Speaker 1: in some regards need to be stripped down and recombined
Speaker 1: and probably will, and so this makes these things much
Speaker 1: more complicated, unfortunately, and the streaming business again a large degree.
Speaker 1: They're talking about the fact that you know, I'm in
Speaker 1: I read an article recently about Orange is the New
Speaker 1: Black cast on how early days of Netflix, they had
Speaker 1: this international hit and the actors would go places and
Speaker 1: be mobbed, but then they literally would get like checks
Speaker 1: for dollar ninety five and they're like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: I thought when you had a hit, you were paid
Speaker 1: at least enough to pay your rent. And that's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: But it does show that Netflix created a different model,
Speaker 1: and they don't report still to this day. Here's how
Speaker 1: many actual people used and saw your thing. So maybe
Speaker 1: there is a way to create these tiers. But the
Speaker 1: business is betwixt and between this new player that sort
Speaker 1: of took over and then the older players that tried
Speaker 1: to transition but just have a lot of they're not
Speaker 1: they're not really one and the same.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very complicated. We talk a lot about the
Speaker 2: success of the office and after we were done, and
Speaker 2: here's the thing that sticks with me. You have people
Speaker 2: who made a lot of money, networks that made a
Speaker 2: lot of money off of the office, and then syndication
Speaker 2: deals that happened both with Turner and with some small
Speaker 2: network syndication and NBC Universal decides seven years after the
Speaker 2: office is done and all the money that has been
Speaker 2: earned and paid and all of that, that it's worth
Speaker 2: five hundred and sixty five million dollars to reacquire the office.
Speaker 2: It's hard to think that they're not making money.
Speaker 1: On that. Oh yes, I mean that that is a
Speaker 1: highly highly, highly profitable They don't. They don't spend that
Speaker 1: kind of money for something that is not an earner,
Speaker 1: you know, yes.
Speaker 2: Right, And so where's how does that trickle down? Like
Speaker 2: if you have to me an acknowledgment that there's a
Speaker 2: valuable property and it's not just the office, obviously, it's
Speaker 2: just more personal for me. I hope she wouldn't be
Speaker 2: upset that I shared this, But Jenni Fisher at one
Speaker 2: point said, you know what's crazy, And this was when
Speaker 2: that figure was out there all the time. Is that
Speaker 2: you know, a person reads that and thinks, oh, look
Speaker 2: how much money the actors got, like look look how
Speaker 2: good they're doing. They are they are rich, Yet the
Speaker 2: formula remains remains unchanged, and that that to me is
Speaker 2: just confusing.
Speaker 1: You know. That is the age old thing like this
Speaker 1: is we could talk about this for an hour in
Speaker 1: and of itself, but the you know, the studio accounting
Speaker 1: which has always been the thing, even going back to
Speaker 1: the heyday of Hollywood, crazy people with different pieces of
Speaker 1: ownership and underlying financing and weird structures that when it
Speaker 1: would go through the accounting system, it was always an
Speaker 1: old joke of like, oh we did it, and amazing,
Speaker 1: you're you're still losing money and because of the.
Speaker 2: Right right how many back end deals?
Speaker 1: Actually that does go back, you know, decades and decades
Speaker 1: and decades because a lot of cost would get loaded
Speaker 1: in and they you know, had acquire big studio lots
Speaker 1: and things that were getting loaded into that. And you know,
Speaker 1: just as you do in your own personal accounting, where
Speaker 1: if you've made some money you try to have right
Speaker 1: offs and like oh, okay, well I didn't really make
Speaker 1: one hundred grand on that I only made twenty because
Speaker 1: look at all these costs. So studios have always done
Speaker 1: the same thing, and sadly it has taken lawsuits, usually
Speaker 1: for being challenged to go in, or audits if they're
Speaker 1: not as public, to go in and say, you know what,
Speaker 1: this doesn't feel right. We're banding together. We got lawyers
Speaker 1: and accountants and we're going to go in and find
Speaker 1: And then there was either some giant settlement or a
Speaker 1: case where finally things would be even doubt And so yeah,
Speaker 1: those dynamics that have been around for too long, and
Speaker 1: yet there still was the irony is even the office
Speaker 1: arguably one of the last of the good ones from
Speaker 1: the old days quote unquote, and even that, you can
Speaker 1: you can feel your own you know, you're you're you're
Speaker 1: an upbeat guy, like you're what you've had your moment.
Speaker 1: You're like, wow, I really thought that would have had
Speaker 1: a little more trickle down here. Okay, but now you
Speaker 1: look forward to guys who are doing Look, there is
Speaker 1: no streaming equivalent because there is no multi generational two
Speaker 1: hundred episode plus, there is no syndication. It's just a
Speaker 1: one time air on a streamer that has a moment
Speaker 1: and then drops to the bottom of an algorithm, So
Speaker 1: there's not even even if the precedents were there, Like
Speaker 1: the whole system that could create the trickle down is
Speaker 1: broken down, and that's it in a nutshell where I
Speaker 1: do believe it will ultimately get reconstituted, and I think,
Speaker 1: to sort of cut to the bottom line, this strike
Speaker 1: will be a brick in the wall of rebuilding a
Speaker 1: new system on the other side, which will have different players,
Speaker 1: because ultimately, I also don't really understand myself how once
Speaker 1: you have something that has been a success at the top,
Speaker 1: whether if you had a hit movie or a hit show,
Speaker 1: you know it would live on where it would be. Oh,
Speaker 1: you could see it in an airplane, you could watch
Speaker 1: it on your before you eat dinner at night on
Speaker 1: your local channel. You could sell it overseas and people
Speaker 1: in other countries would see it. Now, once that thing
Speaker 1: is cycled through, it's at the bottom of the algorithm,
Speaker 1: not only not being seen, but not even expressing itself.
Speaker 1: You know, the real hits were rides at a theme
Speaker 1: park and had T shirts made and all these other
Speaker 1: revenue streams. I don't understand a one app your business
Speaker 1: where everything just has one moment and and it's disposable
Speaker 1: because that is still something that costs billions and billions
Speaker 1: of dollars to produce. So historically the ones that you know,
Speaker 1: the hits, used to pay for all of the failure,
Speaker 1: and it's I'm not saying it's justified, but it is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why they always claim they weren't
Speaker 1: making money because nine of the ten failed, so they
Speaker 1: had to pay with the one that worked, so they
Speaker 1: were like, we're not making money. But I only giving
Speaker 1: this detail because the tapestry now of the business itself
Speaker 1: is different and it's going to be a transition that
Speaker 1: is just not it's still in that transition and it's
Speaker 1: going to take years for that to kind of reconstitute.
Speaker 1: But this will be a brick in the wall, and
Speaker 1: that in a sense, it's good that both unions went out,
Speaker 1: Otherwise nothing would.
Speaker 2: Happen, right Kevin, you're the best. You stayed way longer
Speaker 2: than Oh my god, I.
Speaker 1: Didn't even realize we were blown through it. Well hopefully, no,
Speaker 1: hopefully hung with it.
Speaker 2: Yes you are. You are such a delight one of
Speaker 2: my favorite people ever, and I wish you all the
Speaker 2: best success and for this to resolve itself in some
Speaker 2: way soon so everyone can get back to making making
Speaker 2: great television.
Speaker 1: Yes, it will. I mean there are some quiet talks
Speaker 1: going on now. I mean, I don't know. I think
Speaker 1: we're looking at the October is my gut. But maybe sooner, hopefully.
Speaker 1: And dude, there's a lot of fun. I can't believe
Speaker 1: we blew through so long. You're you're so the easiest
Speaker 1: guy in the world to talk to, you, great at
Speaker 1: what you do, and hitting you on a date for
Speaker 1: some mutually bad golf very quickly.
Speaker 2: All right, Okay, I love it, Kevin, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: See you, buddy, Kevin, thank you so much for joining
Speaker 2: me today. Yes, on golf soon. But more importantly, I
Speaker 2: appreciate your perspective on the current state of entertainment. I
Speaker 2: hope that our reps can have conversations that are as
Speaker 2: honest and enlightening as the one we just had. Listeners.
Speaker 2: I'm going to be back next week as well as
Speaker 2: I always am. If you need something to do while
Speaker 2: you wait, you can follow rate review this podcast, or
Speaker 2: if you're too busy for all that, just tune in
Speaker 2: next week. Either way, have a great one off the
Speaker 2: beat is hosted and executive produced by me Brian Baumgartner,
Speaker 2: alongside our executive producer Lang Lee. Our senior producer is
Speaker 2: Diego Tapia. Our producers are Liz Hayes, Hannah Harris and
Speaker 2: Emily Carr. Our talent producer is Ryan Papa Zachary, and
Speaker 2: our intern is Thomas Olsen. Theme song Bubble and Squeak
Speaker 2: performed by the One and Only Creed Breath