I wrote about the sleight of hand behind HBO’s buying spree, cuts coming to David Ellison’s $6.6 billion in sports rights, and why women are disappearing from Hollywood’s C-suites.
Adults is growing up with FX. I can exclusively report the Disney-owned network has renewed its Gen Z comedy for a supersized 16-episode third season in 2027, and signed its married creators, Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, to an overall deal.
The renewal is more than a vote of confidence in a show whose second-season viewership jumped over 60 percent. It’s also a case study in how John Landgraf, FX’s longtime chairman, has built one of Hollywood’s most successful television brands by doing something that sounds almost heretical in today’s entertainment business: embracing inefficiency.
At a time when studios and streamers are slashing budgets, shrinking development pipelines and increasingly relying on data to guide creative decisions, Landgraf continues to make the opposite bet. Great television, he argues, requires time, risk and a willingness to let creators figure things out — even when the process makes little business sense on paper.
“Efficiency is the enemy of insane levels of quality,” Landgraf tells me. “Insane levels of quality require risk, chaos and inefficiency.”
He has the track record to make that argument. Over more than two decades, FX has canceled just 20 percent of its scripted originals after one season, while building a portfolio of acclaimed series including The Bear, Shōgun and Fargo. “I’ll put [FX’s] 15 shows against anybody else’s 25,” Landgraf says.
But his philosophy is facing a potentially consequential test. As Disney undergoes another round of layoffs and prepares to reorganize its television business, Landgraf is determined to preserve the creative independence — and quality — that has made FX so successful.
In an hourlong conversation, Landgraf explains the new rules for a series renewal, the “wildly inefficient process” his team pursued in developing a new drama from a Succession alum, and why he believes consumers already have far, far more television than they need.
So can Hollywood’s most unapologetically inefficient hitmaker keep doing things his way inside an increasingly cost-conscious Disney and a TV org chart about to be blown up? Landgraf says he’s not worried, even as longtime colleagues depart and the company undergoes sweeping changes. What does the Mayor of TV know that the rest of Hollywood doesn’t?
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