One Big Swing: How ‘Yellowstone’ Was Born From a Single Gut Call
For the first time, former top Paramount exec Kevin Kay reveals how he risked his career on a do-or-die bet on Taylor Sheridan in an impassioned rebuttal to AI
In the mid 2010s, as I was climbing the ladder as a television reporter, one of my key beats was covering the evolution of Viacom after Bob Bakish was installed as CEO. Covering Viacom at the time was not for the faint of heart. With its massive roster of basic cable networks, already showing signs of instability as streaming ascended, there were seemingly an endless number of executives in charge of all these disparate brands. (I should add org chart specialist to my LinkedIn.) Debra Lee and Cyma Zarghami were institutions at BET and Nickelodeon, respectively. Bakish’s plan at the time was to restructure Viacom to create two content groups — Kids and Family, as well as General Entertainment. The latter division was of particular interest to me as a longtime Viacom executive by the name of Kevin Kay was actually growing his purview — adding TV Land and CMT to his portfolio that already included running Spike — rather than seeing his territory trimmed (as Zarghami did when those two cable brands were transferred out from her).
In early 2017, I broke the news that Kay was being tasked with rebranding Spike into Paramount Network in a move that — as Kay recounts in his guest column here today — would be part of Bakish’s plan to compete with free-spending streamers like Netflix and transform the cabler into a home for prestige scripted programming.
A few months after the rebranding news, I visited Kay in his Paramount offices to learn of his plan for turning a male-skewing network like Spike into a “general entertainment” hub — which included paying Kevin Costner a then-whopping $500,000 an episode for an original drama series from Taylor Sheridan, an Oscar nominee that year for his Hell or High Water screenplay but an unproven creator in TV.
That big swing, as Kay recalls in detail, serves today as a reminder to entertainment companies in an age of contraction, cost-cutting, algorithms and AI that development execs bring unique skills and tastes to the table — even as their ranks are being gutted.
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While ChatGPT can spit out a script or legit improve one, it lacks one crucial capacity Kay had, alongside the select few who got Yellowstone — arguably TV’s most transformative show of the last decade — off the ground: instincts that come from years of working in the development trenches.
The launch of Paramount Network was never supposed to hinge on one show. But as Kay recounts here in vivid detail, the stakes could not have been higher as he laid his career and reputation on the line: a frantic nine-month sprint; a Hotel Bel-Air sit-down with Harvey Weinstein to wrest Yellowstone from Amazon; a desperate call at 4 a.m. to beg for a greenlight; tense boardroom fights over soaring budgets; the marketing intel that supported a show for “flyover states”; and how the collapse of The Weinstein Co. drove the jaw-dropping decision to sell streaming rights to NBCUniversal’s Peacock. This is a real-life drama of how Bakish’s “scripted hub” gamble nearly went off the rails — and how a single, career-threatening risk I would argue we need more of set in motion much of the success that David Ellison’s Paramount depends on today. And please, please, please read Kay’s final words about AI and what we lose when we view it as a solution. — LESLEY GOLDBERG
Herewith, Kay, who’s now an independent producer via his own DJKay Entertainment banner, in his own words:
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