I dug into what’s taking Peter Friedlander so long to set TV strategy at Amazon, wrote about Byron Allen’s deal to rent CBS’ late-night block, The Pitt casting controversy, and interviewed legendary TV creator David E. Kelley. I’m lesley.goldberg@theankler.com
Not long ago, while in production on Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles, David E. Kelley mentioned a book that he was interested in adapting to an executive at A24. That was on a Friday. By Monday, the indie studio’s TV team had read Chris Whitaker’s We Begin at the End and told the showrunner they were working to obtain the rights. By the end of that same week, I can exclusively reveal that A24 had won a bidding war for the title and attached Kelley to co-write the script.
In an industry where projects can take months — even years — to move from conversation to contract, that kind of speed isn’t just unusual. It’s increasingly the way to win.
Though its reputation was built on its film darling bona fides, A24 has quietly become one of the most aggressive — and disruptive — players in the television business, pairing lightning-fast dealmaking with a willingness to spend when it matters. The result: a studio that agents love, creators prioritize and competitors are struggling to keep up with.
Their library now includes Emmy-winning shows Euphoria, Beef and Ramy (a full chart of all their shows in development and on air is below).
“It’s difficult to break through when it’s them. They end up being fiercest competition,” one buyer tells me. “When they’re in the mix, there’s a good likelihood they’ll win it.”
This shift comes roughly two years after the company took on a major cash infusion from Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, a deal that valued A24 at $3.5 billion and raised questions about whether the famously curated indie could and would scale up like a traditional studio. So far, the answer has been something else entirely: an ability to push harder, throwing cash at projects they believe in that have that ineffable imprimatur of A24 “taste.”
Which is great news if you’re selling. For everyone else, it’s creating a new reality — a headache where competing with A24 doesn’t just require a strong pitch, but a very different appetite for risk.
Today I break down how A24’s strategy is playing out — and what it means for everyone else in TV, including:
- Who’s running A24’s TV team and how to pitch them
- How A24’s deal speed is collapsing timelines that used to stretch a year or more
- Why agents increasingly steer top projects toward the studio — and how that shifts leverage
- The real cost of competing with A24 in today’s bidding wars
- How creator-friendly terms are driving up expectations across the market
- What the Kushner-backed cash infusion changed — and what it didn’t
- And why A24’s approach is forcing rivals to rethink how they buy, spend and greenlight
- The Amazon show that was “dead” until A24 fought for its return
The Company Overview
The shift becomes clearest when A24 enters a competitive process, and it starts at the top of its TV division.
Ravi Nandan oversees the global TV business, with Sam French running the U.S. team — a deliberately lean group that operates very differently from its legacy competitors, and has the authority to act. What might begin as a standard bidding war can quickly escalate not just in price, but in speed and structure.
“If I know A24 is my competition,” one rival buyer tells me, “I have to prepare my executives to spend $1 million.”
For sellers, that’s a windfall. For everyone else, not so much.
French’s group is small, empowered and able to move without the layers of approvals that slow down larger studios. Instead of servicing dozens of internal mandates or overall deals, A24 operates as a curated buyer.
“In the world of TV, the only real leverage — unless you have the biggest hit in the world — is being at an indie,” says one veteran agent. “Once you’re inside a [big studio] ecosystem, that’s their agenda, not yours.”
What they are looking for? To borrow a phrase from David E. Kelley, the company chases the “scream” inside a writer’s belly and then moves quickly to secure it, often forcing competitors to make decisions on timelines they’re not structured to meet.
Although the studio is not without its swings and many misses (see The Rock’s The Smashing Machine, Eddington, Opus and TV’s Mr. Corman) — Entertainment Strategy Guy has questioned whether its hit rate justifies its valuation — its reputation remains so unparalleled that even the head of a rival indie competitor joined up.
In September 2024, Joe Hipps stepped down as president of TV at Fifth Season — where he had been for eight years — in favor of a producing deal with A24, where he now has high-profile series Trigger Point and Discretion set up at Netflix and Paramount+, respectively.
While Hipps declined comment for this story, sources say his move to A24 was a case of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
Today A24 has more than 250 global employees working under founders Daniel Katz and David Fenkel (their third co-founder, John Hodges, exited in 2018). Of those, around 50 comprise Nandan’s global TV division, with 15 on French’s U.S. team (a far cry from Nandan’s two-person launch team in 2015). Expansion has included 2022 additions Piers Wenger (U.K. television) and Jonathan Hausfater (unscripted).
A24’s U.S. TV slate now boasts 30-40 shows in various stages of development, pre-production or actively filming — including Euphoria, Margo and Beef launching this week alone.
How A24 Wins Bidding Wars Beyond Money
A24 has made headlines as an aggressive buyer in the booming book rights market. That’s exactly what happened with Margo’s Got Money Troubles. By the time Rufi Thorpe’s novel formally hit the marketplace in early 2024, A24 had already lined up producing partners in Elle Fanning’s and Nicole Kidman’s companies. When the project went out, the studio wasn’t just another bidder. A24 ultimately won out over a dozen competitors, including streamers, celebrity-driven production companies and rival indies like Michael Ellenberg’s Media Res, Peter Chernin’s North Road and Fifth Season.
I’ll keep saying it: Speed is the separator. At legacy studios, deals can take anywhere from eight months to more than a year to close, as projects move through layers of internal approvals. A24 collapses that timeline — often quite dramatically.
That compression has ripple effects. It forces competitors to make decisions faster than they’re comfortable with or risk losing the project entirely. But it can also cut both ways. “If I go into a negotiation with a book and know A24 is my competition, they plant a flag in the sand, and I’m reticent to go after it,” says a rival buyer.
A24 backs that urgency with economics. As part of its pitch, the studio is willing to offer creators significantly richer backend participation — in some cases as much as 50 percent, well above the roughly 35 percent long considered standard. “They have more flexibility to make higher ceilings on deals,” the first agent says.
“In a world where everything is consolidating, and companies are so massive, this indie studio lane in TV is critically important to a healthy ecosystem,” a second senior agent tells me.
With an IP market more competitive now than ever before, sluggishness is increasingly frustrating for writers, often with real-life consequences: my colleague Elaine Low wrote earlier this week about WGA members unable to meet the WGA’s threshold to maintain health insurance under the new proposed terms.
Margo is an example of this kind of fast timeline: The rights landed at A24 in October 2023, closed at Apple TV (following another bidding war, natch) in February 2024, and the show is streaming two years later. It’s not hard to imagine other projects toiling in development for that entire time elsewhere.
“Studios sit inside giant companies and wait to see the mandates,” the second agent says, noting deals with legacy companies are still rooted in precedent and “lack urgency” to complete. “A24 moves through it in a more fluid process because they’re not trying to keep an artificial lid on things because ‘that’s how they did it in 1993’ and they’re willing to pass.”
Deal’s Done: What It’s Like to Work With A24
Once a deal is in place, A24 continues to put creatives first as the TV division’s team trusts its creators to deliver on scripts rather than beating them down with a notes process that You showrunner Sera Gamble this week compared to a doctor (the writer) getting a prescription from their patient (the executive).
“Even in disagreement, A24 execs are level-headed and always put the story first before anything else,” says a producer with TV business there. “They trust that the net is going to appear if you make the leap.”
Agents, too, are fond of A24’s development process and how French trusts and empowers his team in an era when scripts can go through multiple rounds of feedback from layers of execs.
“They’ve gone and hired impressive younger execs like Sam French and [senior TV execs] Phoebe Zimmer and Jeff Schwartz,” says the first agent. “They restore a measure of control and sanity to the development process.”
With the first season of Beef, for example, A24 built out the anthology brick by brick, embracing creator Lee Sung Jin’s vision and making deals with stars/exec producers Steven Yeun and Ali Wong that incentivized them to prioritize the show, multiple sources tell me.
“They believe in artists and the idea that wasn’t traditionally commercial, but it ended up being very commercial,” says a source of the series that explored the universality of rage in season 1 and takes on the generational divide with Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac in season 2.
Of course, not every A24 TV series has been a home run. Showtime’s late-night entry Ziwe, Apple TV’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt comedy Mr. Corman and Netflix’s Mo never made it to the three-season marker the way A24’s earliest TV entries, NBC’s The Carmichael Show and Hulu’s Ramy, did.
And while not every show comes in on time and on budget — see HBO’s Euphoria — A24 has demonstrated willingness to support creators with added production funding (“a choice to double down on shows, stories and creators,” says the fifth source). Beef also falls into that category as both A24 and Netflix, ahem, beefed up the show’s season 2 budget after the first run took home eight limited series Emmys in 2024.
As for the future, A24’s TV division continues to be deliberate with its spending as sources say it’s looking for projects that fall into the Venn diagram of commerciality and authorship like Margo, Beef and Euphoria. While sources say some of the Margo team were perturbed with the lack of A24 execs attending their April 8 red carpet premiere in New York in favor of Beef’s L.A. launch party the same night, it was easier to digest after execs came out in force (though not in official photos, per usual) at Margo’s March SXSW world premiere.
The Show’s Made. Now What?
Sources note that part of A24’s commitment to creatives includes going above and beyond when it comes to elements like marketing. On Margo, for example, A24 footed the bill for screenings and merchandise after Apple had exhausted its marketing spend for the series.
“You feel like you have a real partner,” the producer notes. Adds a second source with business at A24: “The brand is first, and the brand is the artist they chose to work with.”
Multiple sources point to the renewal of Amazon’s Overcompensating, the semi-autobiographical comedy inspired by comedian Benito Skinner’s coming out process in conservative Idaho, as an example of how strongly A24 prioritizes its creators. The series, which boasts a 94 percent score among critics and 82 percent rating with viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, was considered “dead” before Nandan, French and TV exec Alli Reich fought for the LGBTQ-themed show, sources say.
“If there’s not somebody fighting for that, nobody at Amazon — with all that was going on there — was going to bring it back and stick their neck out for that. Unless you’re a big creator, you need more people fighting for the cause,” says the second producer. “They’ve given ambitious young execs from larger organizations who don’t get to do much the ability to run with projects and act like producers.”
“The way A24 sees it, why not go all in on something they believe in? It’s a numbers game for bigger places where if you make enough bets and spend enough money, something will pay off,” says a fifth source familiar with A24’s business. “[Legacy studios] spend $1 million over five projects and A24 spends it on one that can pay off.”
As the industry confronts the looming consolidation of Paramount-Warner Bros., the second senior agent says the indies will only increase in importance: “Without these companies, you’d have a buyer market of three or four — depending on the subject matter — and not a lot of room around how dealmaking and timelines are put together.”
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