My Spring Sellers’ Guide has covered what shows they’re buying at Netlfix and Apple TV. I host Ankler Agenda and wrote about millennials’ challenges and Gen Z’s entry pains in the current Hollywood jobs landscape, and I reported on Taylor Frankie Paul and Disney’s Bachelorette mess.
The second week of May reliably brings a few things: lovely spring days in New York, plenty of Met Gala postmortems and Upfronts week, where all the biggest networks (and now streamers) hawk their TV (and now movie) offerings to advertisers on Madison Ave.
Upfronts is an old-school TV pilgrimage, but it is also a microcosm of the rollercoaster changes that are making Hollywood’s stomach drop on the daily: the infiltration of streamers like Netflix and Amazon into the advertising space, the rise of creators on legacy TV and a sense of unease permeating industry folk as yet another corporate merger looms.
“We’ve done this time and time again,” Warner Bros. Discovery co-head of U.S. ad sales Bobby Voltaggio assured me last week in a chat with co-head Ryan Gould ahead of Upfronts (and ahead of Paramount Global’s acquisition of WBD). “We’re battle tested here. This is kind of old hat for us, and we have the relationships with our clients that they understand that this IP is not going anywhere. It’s still very much in very high demand. I believe that Ryan and I have their trust in stewarding the business until the merger actually comes to fruition.”
If nothing else, you can always count on a couple of repeat star sightings — depending which performers are having a busy year. Tina Fey made two appearances (one at Netflix for Four Seasons and another at NBCUniversal for the network’s 100th anniversry), as did Meghann Fahy (NBCU and Amazon) and Jane Krakowski (NBCU and Fox).
So in this special edition of Series Business, here’s my take on the winners (live sports, duh) and losers (absent punching bag David Ellison) of this week’s Upfronts. And for more, tune in to this week’s Ankler Agenda for a rare in-person recording — since we’re all in NYC, we borrowed Spotify’s NYC studio — with yours truly, The Wakeup’s Sean McNulty and Like & Subscribe’s Natalie Jarvey.
Loser: On-Stage Nostalgia Plays
NBCUniversal went all in on its 100th anniversary celebration as a network on the Radio City Music Hall stage. (It began as a radio broadcaster in 1926.)
But some of the attempts to milk the classics didn’t go quite as planned.
Don’t stop here
Unlock the full story — and the no-spin reporting Hollywood trusts
Already a subscriber?
