Julie Plec Maps YA’s New Sweet Spot in Streaming: Platform Fit (& No Phones!)
The 'We Were Liars' creator on what happened at Peacock, how her Uni deal got her to Amazon, returning to agency representation, and how to calm down over Gen Z
I write about TV from L.A. I interviewed Kevin Beggs about Lionsgate’s indie playbook, and I wrote about how to get staffed in a writers room now and the mess at Amazon TV. Email me at lesley.goldberg@theankler.com
Greetings from Los Angeles, where Writers Guild members have joined protests against President Trump’s immigration crackdown and, despite the presence of Marines and National Guard troops, the city is far from being a “war zone.”
Before we get to this week’s column — my exclusive one-on-one with showrunner extraordinaire Julie Plec… I had the pleasure of returning to the moderating stage during a May event, hosted by The Ankler with the Directors Guild of America and presented by Threads, where Elaine Low, Katey Rich and I interviewed eight of TV’s top directors. Now you can hear all of these insightful and inspiring Q&As over two bonus episodes of The Ankler podcast recorded live at L.A.’s DGA Theater: Read about the first episode in Elaine’s latest column (also an awesome primer on the wild new world of microdramas); the second one, out today, includes Liz Garbus, who directed the pilot (and pivotal fifth episode) for Hulu’s Good American Family, Jessica Lee Gagné of Apple TV+’s Severance, Damian Marcano and Amanda Marsalis of HBO Max’s The Pitt, and DGA president Lesli Linka Glatter of Netflix’s Zero Day. (Like and subscribe here to get The Ankler podcast in your feed.)
Speaking of TV geniuses, Julie Plec has made a career out of creating shows that really speak to young adults. The former development executive for Kevin Williamson during his Dawson’s Creek days has had the magic touch in making hits for upstart networks that cater, long before TikTok, to the hard-to-reach 18-34 demographic, starting in 2006 with Kyle XY for the former ABC Family and later striking gold at The CW with The Vampire Diaries. Vampire Diaries, based on a novel series of the same name, ran for eight seasons and generated two spinoffs, The Originals and Legacies, with Plec steering the franchise for 331 hours of television for The CW before its Nexstar-led implosion.
Now Plec, 53, is fulfilling a dream of adapting E. Lockhart’s beloved 2014 novel We Were Liars for Amazon’s Prime Video as she, like her audiences, explores new levels of her own maturity in the process. The psychological thriller about an upper-class white family who summers on a private island off Martha’s Vineyard, premiering June 18, delivers a more mature Dawson’s Creek vibe. With Liars, Plec ditches the supernatural in favor of an examination of generational wealth and the racial and class politics that swirl around it.
After leaving her longtime home at Warner Bros. TV to make YA programming for Universal Television with a rich overall deal in 2020, Plec — whose own production shingle is My So-Called Company (named for the brief but beloved 1990s series My So-Called Life) — saw her first foray for Peacock, Vampire Academy, axed after a single season as the platform failed to recruit younger viewers. The lesson taught both Plec and UTV: Sell the right show to the right platform, even if it’s outside the corporate ecosystem.
In a wide-ranging interview, edited and condensed here, Plec spoke with me about the story she and Liars co-creator/co-showrunner Carina Adly Mackenzie hope to tell and why, despite back-to-back one-and-dones for NBCU platforms (see also NBC’s The Endgame), she renewed her Universal TV deal.
We dived into:
Peacock and why Vampire Academy fizzled: “No one could find us”
Why Plec left WBTV after 15 years and regrets, if any
Her early conversations with Jen Salke that led to how We Were Liars got fast-tracked after a rights battle
Why she signed with representation after firing her agents amid the WGA’s battle over packaging rights
Gen Z’s comfort zone: Plec’s deliberate choice to create a nostalgic, timeless vibe without phones
The delicate casting calculus of staying true to the book’s whiteness while deepening its diversity
What she’s excited about working on next after We Were Liars
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