‘Middle-Power’ Execs are Having a Moment: ‘Don’t Need a Studio and a Water Tower’
Bell Media’s Sean Cohan, Lionsgate’s Kevin Beggs and AMC Networks’ Kristin Dolan on TV’s changed market
I cover TV and host Ankler Agenda. I talked to agents about the Heated Rivalry effect on the romance market, interviewed Heated Rivalry’s casting directors about how they found their stars and dug into agents’ concerns about a Netflix-Warners deal. I’m elaine@theankler.com
Creatives and studio execs: It’s time to take some big swings this year. Don’t let your competitors eat your lunch.
“We had the advantage of a slower moving greenlight process in the U.S. right now, the advantage of paralysis in certain places in the world,” Bell Media president Sean Cohan told me on stage at NATPE Global/Realscreen Summit a few days ago about the success of Heated Rivalry, produced by the Bell-owned Canadian streamer Crave. “If we’re smart, we gotta move faster, we gotta be more decisive, we gotta take some risks.”
With a fresh round of guild negotiations around the corner, Netflix and Warner Bros. on the precipice of merging and the industry more in flux than ever, I expected the tone at the Miami conference to be cautiously optimistic or just straight-up cautious, as it has been in recent years.
Instead, there was a definite sense that the industry is back in business. That bore out through my 1:1 keynote conversations with Cohan and AMC Networks CEO Kristin Dolan, both being honored by NATPE, and a three-person panel with Lionsgate TV Group chief Kevin Beggs, Fremantle’s CEO of commercial and international Jens Richter, and Fox Entertainment Global president Prentiss Fraser.
“I’m feeling really good in a tough market, finding green shoots and things to hold on to, and terrific partnerships,” Beggs said from the stage, while Fraser pointed to Fox’s positive quarterly earnings numbers and said “everything’s on the up, so we have our fingers crossed.”
Also intriguing was the open embrace of AI among a number of the execs and attendees I spoke to, both on the record and off. Dolan, in our panel, enumerated the many ways AMC Networks is working with Runway — the AI company it inked a deal with last year — to help market and develop TV series.
“We use AI to figure out the art of the possible and to help augment the creative,” Dolan told me on stage. “So it’s not used to eliminate jobs. We don’t use it to write scripts. We don’t use it to replace humans, but what we do is we’ll use it throughout the creative process.” So far Runway’s AI tech has been used on AMC shows like Interview with the Vampire, The Walking Dead: Dead City and other series.
Meanwhile, my conversation with Cohan offered up great new insights about why Heated Rivalry landed so big with audiences (have you heard of “reheating”?). You can hear at Ankler Agenda or watch it on YouTube — and below I’ve got some other highlights and intel from my balmy and brisk few days in Miami.
Today, what the smartest middle-power execs are doing differently:
Cohan shares Bell Media’s big creative swings post-Heated Rivalry already in the works
Beggs reveals his strategy to pivot and “double down” on how he sells as consolidation picks off buyers
Cohan’s pushback against the industry’s “sky is falling” thinking and the opportunity he sees amid the big guys’ M&A
Why Fox is getting involved in projects “from the pitch page” and what it means for selling to the network and developing there
How shows at AMC are really using AI for ideation and production — and what Dolan’s company still protects for human creators
What Netflix saw when it licensed Dark Winds — that AMC had missed — and how it boosted the series on both platforms