Check out the April 27 digital edition of B+C HERE.

Check out the March 16, 2020 digital edition of B+C HERE.

FOLLOW B+C ON TWITTER

Schmooze

View photos from the Golden Globes, TCA winter press tour, and more.

B+C's Most-Viewed Stories (Jan. 9-16) 

Verizon Fios Breaks Cable Rules With ‘Mix & Match’

TCA: Showtime Picks Up Second Seasons of ‘L Word: Generation Q’ and ‘Work in Progress’

Nielsen Names Rawlinson to Head Connect Business

Mission Stations Blacked Out to Dish Subscribers

CES: 2020 the Year Selling TV Ads Finally Changes

Fates & Fortunes

Click here to view this week's Fates & Fortunes.

Lead-In

Peacock Spreads Its Feathers

Three CBS-Owned CW Stations Add Nightly News

The Watchman: Gina Rodriguez for President, Fox News's Hemmer Time, Fresh 'Station' Chief

Click here to view this week's Lead-In.

Who's Spending What Where

Click here to view this week's Who's Spending What Where.

FOLLOW B&C ON TWITTER

Schmooze

Click here to view photos from the 2018 Primetime Emmy Awards.

BC.com

NBC Station Group Buys Syndicated 'Kelly Clarkson'

Gray TV Reaches Agreement to Renew NBC Affiliations

Analyst Sees Viacom Still Stuffing Commercials Into Shows

Facebook Watch Deals Itself Interactive Poker Series

Lead-In

Click here to view this week's Lead-In.

Platforms: Connections

Click here to view this week's Platforms: Connections.

Voices: Verizon Unveils 5G Fixed Wireless Service, Doesn’t Scare Anyone

Mobile Video Viewing Spiked 55% from 2015-2017, Research Group Says

Who's Spending What Where

Click here to view this week's Who's Spending What Where.

FOLLOW B&C ON TWITTER

Schmooze

View photos from ABC's 'black-ish' celebrates its 100th episode, Paley honors singer Dionne Warwick's PBS special, and more.

Click here to view more photos.

BC.com

Court Boosts FCC Case in State Net Neutrality Fight

ESPN Integrating eBay Shopping into Website

FCC Won't Pull Licenses From Hurricane-Affected 'Dark' Stations

Buzz Meter

Click here to view this week's Buzz Meter.

Lead-In

Click here to view this week's Lead-In.

Platforms: Connections

Click here to view this week's Platforms: Connections.

Vewd Poaches Android TV Product Chief Sascha Prüter

Who's Spending What Where

Click here to view this week's Who's Spending What Where.

Schmooze

View photos from Investigation Discovery's IDCon 2018, Netflix's FYSEE event for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and more

Click here to view more photos.

BC.com

Survey: Local TV News Is Booming

Demand Progress Calls for Flood of Sinclair-Tribune Opposition

TV Ad Revenue to Grow to $74.9B by 2022: PwC

Discovery Announces $2B International PGA Tour Deal

Buzz Meter

Click here to view this week's Buzz Meter.

Lead-In

Decision Day May Not Resolve AT&T-TW’s Fate

Title II Exiting, Stage Right

The Watchman : Billy Bob Holds Court on ‘Goliath’, ‘Big City Greens’ Brings Country to the City

Click here to view this week's Lead-In.

Need to Know

5G—Riding Wireless's Next Wave

Cable Is Wired for 5G

Platforms: Connections

The Bauminator Blog: Charter’s Mobile Pricing to Mimic Comcast’s: Report

Click here to view this week's Platforms: Connections.

Who's Spending What Where

Click here to view this week's Who's Spending What Where.

Why This Matters: The 2018 B&C Hall of Fame class is the 28th group of top television industry leaders to be honored by the magazine. 

They are innovators and image-makers, trailblazers and groundbreakers, forerunners and trendsetters — in short, the leaders of our industry, then and now. And they make up an exclusive membership: The 27 years of inductees to the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame.

On Oct. 29, at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in New York, B&C adds a 28th class to its prestigious group. Below, in this exclusive announcement, we reveal the new honorees for the first time.

They join the more than 400 names already enshrined, with our recent selections sharing something else: An awestruck gratitude at being included alongside the likes of Lucille Ball and William S. Paley, and Walter Cronkite and Oprah Winfrey. As Bill Koenigsberg, founder and CEO, Horizon Media, put it at the 2014 ceremony, “[My 88-year-old mother] didn't think I had a place in this industry. You see, mom? I’m up here now.”

[Welcome to the 27th Annual ‘Broadcasting & Cable’ Hall of Fame]

The Hall was launched in 1991, the 60th anniversary of this publication, and that first class of 60 names included luminaries from Milton Berle and Joan Ganz Cooney, to Mark Goodson and Brian Lamb, to Edward R. Murrow and Frank Stanton. In each of the years since, we’ve added to an Honor Roll that stretches from the godmother of television comedy, Gracie Allen, to the godfather of television first-run syndication, Frederic Ziv, and includes the likes of Johnny Carson, Debra Lee, Norman Lear and Fred Rogers. No doubt, it’s what inspired NBC entertainment chairman, Robert Greenblatt, to observe last year during his induction, “This is kind of extraordinary for a kid who, 34 years ago, packed up a car from rural Illinois and drove to Los Angeles to be part of the entertainment industry, really not knowing anybody out there or what I was going to do.”

As we set the tables and prepare to pop the corks for the incoming class, it’s worth noting that, as in years past, our 2018 honorees represent the ever-widening breadth of this industry, including top executives, network CEOs, visionary sales chiefs, pioneering agents and familiar and respected on-air faces. And, as B&C has done 13 other times, we also honor a long-running series — in this case, for four decades — with six Peabody Awards to its name.

Along with the expected charms and quips from those in the 2018 class, a portion of the proceeds for the evening will, as it has for several years, be donated to both the Broadcasters Foundation of America — benefiting those industry colleagues and their families who have fallen on hard times — and the Paley Center.

[Heard at the 2017 'B&C' Hall of Fame]

The evening will, as always, be one of celebration, by those who have risen to an exalted post in our industry, propelled by great teams producing even greater ideas. “I look at this room, and the vast accomplishments of everybody … and I know how blessed and lucky I am to be your colleague,” Robin Roberts, co-anchor of ABC’s Good Morning Americaobserved at the 2014 ceremony. “I thank all of you … for the example each of you set in this beautiful, challenging, crazy industry that we all love.”

It’s a sentiment echoed year in and year out, perhaps rarely more poignantly than by HBO chairman and CEO, Richard Plepler, in 2013 who said, “I’m nothing but grateful that there is at least one hall of fame that will have me and that I can call home.”

That said, this year’s class will have the challenge of trying to best the likes of Ted Harbert, chairman, NBC Broadcasting and NBCUniversal, who, upon accepting his 2011 honor, declared, “I’m truly moved beyond words…but that’s never stopped me before.”

And the 2018 Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame honorees are:

20/20, ABC News’ Primetime News Magazine

Christiane Amanpour, Anchor and Chief International Correspondent, CNN

Ira Bernstein & Mort Marcus, Co-Presidents, Debmar-Mercury

Charlie Collier, President & GM, AMC, SundanceTV and AMC Studios

Cesar Conde, Chairman, NBCUniversal International Group and NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises

Carole Cooper and Richard Leibner, Agents and Special Advisers to the UTA Board of Directors

Brian Deevy, Director, Liberty Media Corp., RBC/Daniels & Associates

Gayle King, Co-Host, CBS This Morning

Greg Meidel, President, Twentieth Television

Courteney Monroe, CEO, National Geographic Global Networks

Jordan Wertlieb, President of Hearst Television

Linda Yaccarino, Chairman, Advertising & Client Partnerships, NBCUniversal

FOLLOW B&C ON TWITTER

Schmooze

View photos from FX's For Your Consideration event for 'Better Things', Azteca America's upfront, and more.

Click here to view more photos.

BC.com

Viacom Makes Advanced Advertising Deal with Comcast

IPG Study Finds Roku Ads More Effective Than Linear

TV Network Profits to Fall 41% by 2025, Analyst Says

Buzz Meter

Click here to view this week's Buzz Meter.

Lead-In

Click here to view this week's Lead-In.

Platforms: Connections

The Bauminator Blog: FilmStruck's Twitter Tilt Goes Viral

Click here to view this week's Platforms: Connections.

Who's Spending What Where

Click here to view this week's Who's Spending What Where.

FOLLOW B&C ON TWITTER

Schmooze

View photos from PaleyFest LA 2018, the premiere of WE tv's Hustle & Soul and more.

Click here to view more photos.

BC.com

Missouri TV Tower Collapses

Comcast, Charter Form Mobile Platform Partnership

FCC Frees Up $742 Million More for Post-Incentive Auction Repack

Buzz Meter

Click here to view this week's Buzz Meter.

Lead-In

Click here to view this week's Lead-In.

Platforms: Connections

The Bauminator Blog: Facebook: Tests Show AV1 Streaming Performance is Exceeding Expectations

Click here to view this week's Platforms: Connections.

Washington

To check out the commissioner’s kid vid proposal, click here.

Who's Spending What Where

Click here to view this week's Who's Spending What Where.

Click here to view a pdf of Data Mine.

Click here to view a pdf of Buzz Meter.

Click here to view a pdf of this week's Platforms: Connections

Click here to view a pdf of Lead-In.

Glenn Geller has come a long way, in every way, since he set out two decades ago from sleepy northwest Indiana for Los Angeles. At one point, he was pulled over for speeding his little Ford Escort, with no AC or radio, through the Arizona desert. Geller came clean to the cop—he was headed for L.A. to make a new start, and he was flat broke. He got off with a warning.

The SoCal sun has shone on him ever since. In September, Geller, with CBS since 2001, was named the network’s entertainment president, succeeding Nina Tassler. The promotion is still sinking in. “It’s so amazing in this business that you can come here with literally nothing,” Geller says, “and really end up with something.”

Geller’s promotion may have prompted a chorus of “Who?” around Hollywood. But Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp. president and CEO, says it surprised no one at the network. “I’m very impressed by Glenn’s knowledge of the business, his taste, his character, and his stubbornness to fight for what he believes in,” says Moonves. “He’s not afraid to stand up to me, which I appreciate, as much as people might think otherwise.”

California Dreaming

The genial Geller had a typical childhood in the suburbs of Chicago, where he participated in sandlot sports and his school’s marching band. He describes the Calumet Region as something of a No Man’s Land—not quite Chicago, but not very Indiana either.

After getting his master’s at Northwestern, Geller told his family he was heading to L.A. His folks asked if he was serious. When Geller said he was, his father announced they would drive out in his truck, with the younger Geller’s Escort in tow.

“I really loved that journey,” Geller recalls. “I got to know my father in a different way. I asked him a lot of questions I probably would not have gotten to ask.” The one negative was an accident in Texas, which meant Dad could no longer tow the Escort.

After arriving, Geller reached out to every Northwestern grad he could and found work as an assistant in Fred Silverman’s production shop. Silverman, who had held top posts at multiple major networks, including president of NBC, recalls Geller as ambitious. “You can tell in a second if someone is bright, alert and inquisitive,” Silverman says. “Glenn was all three.”

Reading scripts and assisting a TV legend, Geller got a good look at how hits were made. “The real lesson was, you have to go with your gut,” he says. “Fred had a real strong opinion about what he thought would work.”

Geller moved to 20th Century Fox Television, where he was dubbed “Mr. CBS” by colleagues when a pair of his projects, Judging Amy and The Education of Max Bickford, aired on the rival network. So it was fitting that he soon landed at CBS. Geller toiled in current programming at both the network and the studio, giving him a keen perspective on the business.

Being an entertainment division president these days is much different than it was even five years ago, with OTT platforms not only competitors but buyers of network fare as well. Moonves says Geller has proven adept at reading the new landscape. “It became evident that this guy has the mind of a network entertainment president,” says Moonves.

When he’s not working, Geller and his husband, Jim, sing in a gay/lesbian chorus and remodel their L.A. home. “I spend my weekends at Lowe’s, doing home improvements,” he says. “Like a lot of America.”

Geller has a big rebuild in front of him at CBS. He sees promise in rookie shows including Limitless and Life in Pieces and wonders why some of the net’s veteran programs, such as Elementary, do not get the buzz of OTT series.

But he’ll take broadcast’s reach over buzz any day. “People welcome us into their living rooms,” Geller says. “They want to watch the good guys beat the bad guys. They want to laugh really hard. That’s what makes this the best game in town.”

At 16, Fritz Coleman had a “religious experience.” Seeing George Carlin at the Valley Forge Music Fair in Devon, Pa. in 1964 transformed his life.

“I was completely smitten by watching this man control the emotions of 3,000 people with just a mic and his twisted thoughts,” Coleman says. “It was the most amazing night of my life. I thought, ‘I’d love to try that.’”

Even before then, Coleman had long wanted to be on TV. Growing up an only child in Philadelphia, he enjoyed being the center of attention among adults and could always make them laugh. His heroes were Johnny Carson and Bob Hope.

“I always wanted to be inside that box, but I hadn’t finalized what form to take,” Coleman says. It ended up being weather, of all things. Coleman, 67, has spent over 30 years merging his stand-up skills, timing, spontaneity and affable personality as NBC4 Los Angeles’ weathercaster.

Not that TV seemed attainable for Coleman in college, when his poor grades caused him to enlist in the Navy. He was lucky, though; in addition to avoiding Vietnam during the war’s peak while his aircraft carrier cruised the Mediterranean, his 3½ years working for Armed Forces radio and TV introduced him to his future career.

Out of the Navy, Coleman worked in radio in the 1970s. Regularly invited to host at events and clubs, he emceeed at the Tralfamadore Café, a famous jazz club in Buffalo. N.Y. He wrote material to fill the time before the musicians went on, which led to a career in stand-up. He soon had 15-20 minutes of material as the de facto opening act. The owner eventually gave Coleman his own comedy night. It sold out every week.

Having “conquered” Buffalo, Coleman felt he was “ready for the big time,” so he moved west.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t go well at first. Coleman was good by Buffalo standards, but in Hollywood his competitors included Garry Shandling and Billy Crystal. Coleman kept at it, improving his observational comedy act at open mics in coffee shops and improve venues and, two years in, he was a paid regular at the Comedy Store.

In 1982, Coleman had another lifechanging experience as a result of a comedy show. KNBC’s news director happened to be in the audience as Coleman spoke about doing weather in the Navy; after the show, he asked Coleman to fill in as a weekend weathercaster.

“When that opportunity presented itself, doing weather on TV for the second-largest market in the entertainment capital of world, it sounded like the end of the yellow brick road,” Coleman recalls.

Radio and comedy turned out to be great training for a job in TV news, particularly for Coleman’s understanding of the relationship with listeners, point of view and the “discipline of time.”

That comes in handy when Coleman has only a minute or two to deliver the weather forecast for nine different microclimates in Southern California, or delve into larger issues such as El Niño storms or the state’s drought.

“Fritz makes it so relatable,” says NBC4 morning meteorologist Crystal Egger. “He understands every community so well.”

Colleagues say Coleman is the happiest person in the building. He always smiles, never complains and brings everybody Starbucks. “Fritz is it. He’s the real deal,” says coanchor Colleen Williams. “The guy you see on TV is the guy you see in person.”

Nowadays, comedy is only a hobby for Coleman. He still appears at various venues and has his own night at The Ice House in Pasadena. Over the years he has put on four single-topic, one-man plays—about being a parent, a divorcé, the local news and being over 50.

Where Coleman spends much of his time is out in the community, speaking at town halls and speaking at charity functions and fundraisers. “He is more philanthropic with his time than anybody I know,” Williams says.

“He feels it’s his job to give back to the community that’s spent so many years watching him,” Egger says. “He wants to thank them.”

Writer and producer Frank Spotnitz landed in television because of a phone call.

Shortly after the end of Season 1 of The X-Files in 1994, Spotnitz rang up series creator Chris Carter on behalf of a longtime friend, writer André Bormanis. Spotnitz had met Carter through a mutual friend’s book group, and Bormanis requested an introduction.

Carter said no to Bormanis (though he went on to work on the Star Trek TV series Voyager and Enterprise). But Carter did say yes to Spotnitz, letting him pitch ideas for X-Files and eventually hiring him as a writer.

“I was extremely green,” says Spotnitz of the job, which was his first staff gig after film school. “X-Files was really my second film school, and I learned an enormous amount.” After three years with the hit Fox show, Spotnitz had risen to executive producer and has stayed in television since, writing and producing series including ABC’s Night Stalker, Cinemax’s Strike Back and most recently Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle.

One of the reasons Spotnitz has been successful in TV is his ability to understand complex worlds and translate them into characters and narratives viewers can relate to. High Castle, based on the 1962 Philip K. Dick novel, is a case in point. High Castle, which proposes an alternate 1960s reality for the U.S. based on the idea that Germany and Japan won World War II, has had a long and checkered development history. Spotnitz first boarded the project in 2012, when it was a miniseries at Syfy.

The boldness of the novel’s premise, like that of many works by Dick that were the basis of films including Blade Runner and Minority Report, made the adaptation daunting. “It’s a wonderful book. It’s a classic book. But it’s not a narrative for a television series,” Spotnitz says. “And I was really stuck for a little while because I didn’t want to touch it.”

Ultimately, though, Spotnitz realized one of the previous adaptations had completely changed the book and when he looked at it from that new angle, he says he felt “a little liberated.”

David W. Zucker, High Castle executive producer and television president for Scott Free Productions, believes Spotnitz cracked the code. “He’s found a way of both honoring and incorporating so much of what many people believe was an unadaptable novel and finding a way of making it incredibly compelling, but most of all relatable,” Zucker says.

Syfy passed on High Castle (BBC had rejected the project previously) and the project lay dormant for nearly two years. Cut to more recent times, with more content platforms launching more ambitious original shows, and Spotnitz got a call from Amazon Studios head of drama development Morgan Wandell, who “rescued it,” Spotnitz says.

But with Amazon spending lavishly to make its mark in original dramas, Spotnitz had more work to do. The streaming service wanted 10 episodes with an open-ended story structure that would allow for additional seasons. Initially, he had developed the story as a four-hour mini.

Amazon released the first two episodes of High Castle earlier this year, with the remaining eight landing on Nov. 20. The company says the pilot is its most-viewed and best-reviewed ever, and the show met with a buzzy reception at last summer’s TCA press tour.

Spotnitz hopes the series, beyond getting tune-in, will leave an impression on viewers.

“I hope this show reminds people of what a great country this is and how it’s worth fighting to change things to make it better, to make it live up to what it’s supposed to be to the idea of what it’s supposed to be,” he says.

Spotnitz has “a huge appetite” for storytelling.

“I feel like there are more stories I’d like to tell than I’m going to have time to tell in my lifetime and part of why I started Big Light was because it allows me to do more,” said Spotnitz, who will be celebrating his Nov. 17 birthday over the weekend receiving a Camerimage award for achievement during the Caeraimage Festival in Poland.

Coming up for Big Light is Medici: Masters of Florence, a historical drama about the powerful Medici family in Renaissance Italy. Spotnitz also revealed that he is working on a Sigmund Freud project and Ransom, about a real-life hostage negotiator.

Spotnitz knew he wanted to tell stories from an early age and had to convince his Army doctor father it was a good idea.

“I became very clear I think by the time I was 16 that I was not going to do that [science],” he said. “And then they decided to support me and were very supportive.”

The Japan-born showrunner first intended to go into movies but by his first year at the University of California, Los Angeles he had other intentions.

“I was just so excited by the opportunity to understand the world and make a difference in the world,” he said of his discovery of journalism. “So I was very, very idealistic and that’s what got me started.”

After graduation, Spotnitz went to work at United Press International and then the Associated Press. But he realized the more he covered, the less he liked the field.

“My understanding of what I was writing was very superficial and I didn’t really feel like I was making the difference that I had set out to make,” he said.

Flash forward and the industry vet has been able to dig deep into his stories, something he feels he can especially do with science fiction.

“I have to say I think I find science fiction the easiest genre to know why I’m writing it, which is to say when you’re writing science fiction it’s always about something,” he said. “There’s always an idea. There’s always a reason why you’ve chosen this apart from literal reality and I like that. I like stories that are about something.”

With rapid consumer and tech changes putting basic business models under extreme scrutiny, finding the right mix of tech, TV and sound business models has been job No. 1 at all the major programmers. That imperative has also made Marc DeBevoise a rising star in the digital world, first at Starz and more recently at CBS Interactive, where his teams developed the first broadcast network standalone SVOD product, CBS All Access.

“Marc isn’t just a media guy,” says Jim Lanzone, president and CEO of CBS Interactive. “He’s financially savvy, he’s digitally savvy and he’s an expert on the corporate development side,” which has made him “a key leader…during a period of transition for CBS, not only from linear to digital, but also within digital itself.”

He displayed his ability to use a variety of skills to put together a winning game plan at Tufts University—in the classroom and on the basketball court, where he was sixth man, coming off the bench for the Division III Jumbos.

“I played range of small forward, power forward and shooting guard” so the team, which had two 20-plus-win seasons during his college years, “could swing 2 to 4, as a knowledgeable basketball person would say,” he quips.

In the classroom, where he was fascinated by the growing confluence of tech and media, he studied economics and computer science. He added finance to his skills after graduation, working as an investment banker in media and tech deals. Hoping to move into the media and entertainment industries, he returned to school to get an MBA at New York University, where he did internships at Cablevision and Miramax Films.

After landing a job at NBC, he drew on his financial skills to work in the business development group on the acquisition of Universal before becoming more active in digital, helping set up the company’s first centralized digital team.

In 2006, a mutual friend recommended DeBevoise to former NBC president Neil Braun, who was looking for someone to launch a digital operation at IDT Entertainment, which was later sold to Liberty Media and then merged with Starz after DeBevoise took the job.

“He was digital before digital was cool,” says Braun, now the dean of Pace University’s Lubin School of Business. “Marc’s background in cable and broadcast companies, as well as Wall Street,” gave him the perfect combination of tech and business savvy to capitalize on TV and digital media’s convergence.

DeBevoise’s work landed him on several lists of up-and-coming TV execs, and caught the attention of CBS Interactive’s Lanzone, who hired him in 2011. DeBevoise has the no-nonsense , direct speaking style of an investment banker but Lanzone stresses that his people skills and his ability to “galvanize teams” have played a major role in their successes at CBS Interactive.

“Maybe he picked this up playing college basketball but it’s been super important at CBS, because our group operates across the entertainment, sports and news divisions,” Lanzone says. “Without everyone’s trust in Marc” and his ability to work closely with all those divisions, “we wouldn’t have been able to make this much progress so quickly on things like All Access [and] CBSN.”

Those products have also helped CBS bring in younger demos. “The demos for both services are incredibly young relative to the overall demo [and] they’ve allowed us to discover things about ourselves that can be incredibly relevant to the next generation of viewers,” DeBevoise says.

The next generation is also his big priority outside of work: With two young kids, DeBevoise says most of his free time is happily spent with his family. But he’s also managed to carve out time to help young people in New York City as the president of the board at The Door, which serves about 11,000 underprivileged youth aged 12 to 21. “It is a big-time commitment but has been incredibly rewarding,” he says.

DeBevoise says that he got involved with The Door after reaching out to a friend who led outside board recruitment for Robin Hood, which is one of The Door’s larger funders. After explaining that he hoped to work with young people and that he was looking to be involved with a not-for-profit that was “something close by, in my community, if possible…she introduced me to The Door,” he says. “I fell in love with it quickly.”

“It really fits [what I wanted to accomplish by helping] underserved, at-risk youth ages 12-21 and its main location is a building on Broome St. and 6th Ave. which is less than 1 mile from my apartment in the West Village,” he says. “I later joined the University Settlement board—essentially the parent organization to The Door—and we also launched a charter school inside The Door named Broome Street Academy.”

At work, a major priority continues to be expanding the reach of their digital properties, both on new devices and in newer market. “We are already in over 100 markets [for CBS All Access] and will be in 135 by the end of the year,” he says. “That will give us 85% coverage, which is tremendous progress in just over a year.”

“You still haven’t seen another broadcaster roll out as many stations on any platform other than TV as we have,” he adds.

Looking forward, they are working to launch on additional platforms. “You can now subscribe [to it] on Roku and you’ll see us coming to new platforms in the next few months,” he says. In addition, “we are looking at what additional bundles we can do—who we can development marketing relationships with and have co-billing relationships with.”

Developing better systems for analyzing data is also important, both for improved ad targeting and for their content strategies. “We don’t have show-stacking and full-season offerings and the ones we do go after to get back and buy from third party studios…will be based on user trends,” he explains.

Gray’s ‘Year of Great Achievement’ Capped Off With Schurz Acquisition

Plenty of people like to say that they “grew up in the broadcast business.” For Hilton Howell, it was quite literally the case. His grandfather started KWTX in Waco, Texas, where Howell was born and spent his childhood forming a connection with the business that would shape his life and career.

Howell, 53, likes to tell the story of Roy Disney coming to town to buy the ABC station. He remembers hearing over the dinner table about how intimidated everyone was by Disney and his team from Beverly Hills and how concerned they were about competing with “Hollywood.” Yet despite going up against “the most sophisticated media people on the planet,” Howell says, KWTX remained the dominant station in the area.

“It proved to me the stickiness of the broadcast brand and the value to the community,” he says.

Howell never actually worked in a station, per se. He hung around the Waco station growing up and then went off to college, law school and business school. He practiced commercial litigation law initially and eventually came to be involved in dozens of businesses, from lumber mills to insurance companies, always looking for the next great opportunity. He says Gray was the first.

“It’s a great business,” Howell says. “It serves a vital purpose, which is even more true today.”

Getting Face Time

When Howell and his father-in-law purchased control of Gray Communications Systems from the Gray family in 1993, the company had just three stations (and some other assets Howell divested). Today, Gray Television owns and operates network-affiliated stations in 50 markets (upon completion of all announced deals), up from 30 in fall 2013.

The company is focused on the kind of station Howell grew up with—devoted to the community and journalism. As Gray grows, it looks only for stations that fit its specific profile and mold.

“I see how terribly needed [TV] is today,” Howell says. “The attention to local community makes all the difference.”

Howell acts as a “boots on the ground” type of leader as president and CEO, says Jason Effinger, Gray senior VP, media and technology.

Howell goes out of his way to talk to people in the company in person. He does not hesitate to show up at stations in multiple markets on the same day just to look people in the eye, welcome them to Gray and tell them in a “very calm yet passionate demeanor” what Gray stands for and how it operates, Effinger says. “He’s really easy to talk to for someone with his experience and in his position.”

For instance, Howell went to Twin Falls, Idaho a few months ago after Gray had acquired KMVT and KSVT to take part in an event welcoming Gray into the community. The next day, he traveled to small-market North Platte, Neb., to thank staff and celebrate the station’s move to a new facility. He then flew to Madison, Wis., to meet with staff to unveil plans for a new building. Later that same day, he went to Wausau, Wis., where Gray had established a new low-power station to become the market’s Fox affiliate and sister station to Gray’s CBS affiliate WSAW.

“Every business is only as good as the people you have in the business,” Howell says. “I like to get out because people just need to have face-to-face exposure. I love it.”

Growing From the Bottom Up

The onset of the M&A push two years ago coincided with Howell’s decentralization of Gray’s management team to give local stations and their managers more autonomy and responsibility. Gray became leaner at the top and more cohesive and streamlined throughout. Howell trusts his team, knowing that transparency internally goes a long way to improve and increase Gray’s growth.

“Everyone in our company knows what our goals are and what they need to do to achieve them,” he says.

Despite having a busy schedule as CEO, Howell is selfless with his time, Effinger says, recalling an evening when Howell presided at three simultaneous company events. Last fall, Gray held its first news director meeting in some time. Effinger says Howell felt it was important to take everyone out for a nice meal, but there were too many people for one restaurant. So they split up the news directors into three groups and had three separate gatherings. A different senior VP was at each; Howell attended all of them. Instead of sitting down and actually eating dinner, Howell made a toast and shook everyone’s hand at all three locations.

Howell and his team work hard—even on weekends, if need be—because he has instilled a sense of duty and devotion for their work. He is not a “stereotypical CEO,” Effinger says. “He’s having fun because he believes in what he’s doing.”

“I’ve always loved television,” Howell says. “This is where I want to be. I can’t imagine doing other things.”

Michael Nathanson, the oft-quoted securities analyst who covers the media business, has many family members in show business.

Jeff Zucker, CEO of CNN, is Nathanson’s brother-in-law, a connection that was tabloid fodder when Zucker ran NBCUniversal and Nathanson would comment on NBC and its rivals.

Nathanson’s sister Caryn was a producer for Saturday Night Live and his brother Steve did publicity for Whitney Houston and Paramount Pictures. His wife was a booker at Extra; her sister Allison Wallach was an agent at UTA and is now president of Jupiter Entertainment; and her brother Lou Wallach was a producer and Comedy Central executive.

But Nathanson, a Brooklyn native, credits another Nathanson with kindling his desire to get into TV. Ted Nathanson, no relation, was a producer for NBC Sports. “I always heard his name and people would ask me about him, and I always felt like that would be a really cool job,” he says.

At Brandeis University, Nathanson wrote papers about television and society and was drawn to the business and finance side of TV. After earning an MBA at Yale, he landed a job at MGM/UA in L.A. The company was sold, went bankrupt, and Nathanson lost his job.

Back home, he joined Rainbow Programming Holdings—run by Josh Sapan, now AMC Networks CEO—as business analyst for Bravo, AMC and News 12 Long Island. He moved to Time Warner as director of business development at Time Inc., which was trying to get its magazines into video.

That was when Nathanson transitioned to Wall Street with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Bernstein was hiring people to analyze industries they worked in “who knew where the bodies were buried and where the issues were,” says Tom Wolzien, the analyst turned consultant who recruited Nathanson. He “had the experience and the knowledge of how these companies work.”

Nathanson was first covered European media companies. Along the way he met an investor relations exec, David Cameron. “I would never have suspected that the head of IR at Carlton Communications would become prime minister of Great Britain. Truly amazing,” Nathanson recalls.

Nathanson distinguished himself by recognizing and writing about how the recorded music industry was falling apart. “The companies were in total denial at the time, giving him a lot of pressure.” Wolzien says. “That’s when he cut himself out from the rest of the pack.”

After Wolzien retired, Nathanson began covering U.S. media companies. He moved to Nomura Securities, where he was a regular on the Institutional Investor All-America Research Team. Then he joined with Craig Moffett, another former Bernstein analyst, who had opened up an independent research company.

“In seven years of working together at Sanford Bernstein, Michael was the best thought partner I ever had. When Michael left Bernstein for Nomura, it was like I had lost my right arm. It was only natural that I would jump at the chance to put the band back together again,” Moffett says.

“Michael has an uncanny ability to draw longer-term strategic insights from the mosaic of data points that fly at us every day. Pattern recognition is a rare gift,” Moffett says.

“It doesn’t hurt that Michael is the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. The greatest joy in starting a business is doing it with people that you genuinely like going to work with every day.”

These days, Nathanson reports on big media companies as pressure builds on the TV economy. He’s tracked falling ratings and slower growth in ad revenue.

“I’m worried about media. It’s going to get tougher. But I’ve seen industries collapse, and this doesn’t look anything like the music industry,” he says.

Neveretheless, Nathanson recently added coverage of Internet companies, which are growing share as TV advertising declines, to his beat, initially recommending Google and Facebook.

Click HERE to view pdf.

Click HERE to view pdf.

Christina Miller's promotion during Turner’s massive reorganization in 2014 sent her in what seemed like a very different direction. She went from strategy, marketing and program roles with Turner Sports and NBA Digital to leading Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Boomerang as president and GM.

What appeared to be a left turn was actually more of a U-turn to an area she knows well, though. Miller had served a stint at Cartoon and had worked at HIT Entertainment for nine years.

“That’s where I grew up, kids entertainment,” said Miller.

And though she sees a lot of commonality between sports and kids/young adult programming, she recalls a major project from her sports tenure that drove home a defining difference: Turner’s partnership with CBS on college basketball’s March Madness.

“It was this big moment and decision to really think about how you can change…every game live, all four networks at once, staggered start times,” said Miller. “All of these things you would do differently to an audience that was watching it for 30 years. So that was really about introducing change and innovating, but that’s to some degree changing habits.”

Now, in running Cartoon, Miller sees her job as enabling the network to create habits.

“When you look at kids, there’s none of that. You’re creating that,” said Miller. “You can’t let your adult brain get in the way sometimes about the relationship different demos have with technology or communicating that change to them. Kids are mobile natives. They are digital natives. They’re plural. They communicate visually. They expect this content to be everywhere and work everywhere. We don’t need to teach them that. We need to teach ourselves that they expect that.”

Miller credits her flexibility and ability to connect with viewers to three mentors over her career: HIT Entertainment’s David Jacobs and Turner’s David Levy and Lenny Daniels.

“They all have in common a sort of people-first approach,” said Miller. “I think with Lenny taking a risk moving me into sports made me more agile and adaptable. And all three of those guys made me work well with change.”

Whether it’s network websites and apps, 15-second microplatform Cartoon Network Anything, VOD, mobile games, virtual reality, linear or Turner’s Hulu partnership, it’s about “total consumption” for Miller.

“Our fans are watching our content on all platforms.” she said. “It’s not a different person on different platforms. So how do you make sure you’re giving them a cohesive experience?” The central question, she adds, is “How do we know that we’re programming and treating this whole ecosystem as a single brand and allowing people to come in and come out across the spectrum as easy and intuitively as possible?”

David Levy, president of Turner Broadcasting, has worked with Miller for the past 10 years and saw her career take off when she worked in Turner Sports and NBA Digital.

“Think about her having 30 bosses, because she was really being managed and herding all the NBA owners and teams and getting them in line for whatever projects she was working on,” said Levy. “When I took on my new role at the company, I thought [she was] the perfect person for me to bring back.”

Levy has been equally impressed with Miller’s time leading Cartoon.

“She’s brought Cartoon back to double-digit rating increases,” Levy noted. “In this marketplace, any time you have any kind of ratings increases it’s tremendous. And she’s done that in a kids business that is very fickle.”

As for when Miller has free time, it’s mostly about traveling and taking in all things media.

“Travel is up there as the highest one when I’m free and when I’m looking for a real way to wind down. Exploring the furthest ends of the Earth, I’m up for it,” said Miller. “Doesn’t really matter to me how long the flight is, I’m ready to go.”

Jack Dempsey runs the market leader in the so-called Tri-Cities along the Virginia/Tennessee border, but perhaps his best work takes place in a fourth city. While some broadcast leaders would rather sit through root canal than engage with their legislators in Washington, D.C., Dempsey, GM at Bonten Media Group’s WCYB-WEMT, hits the Hill every opportunity he can. “For me, it’s an honor and a thrill to point out the great things that local broadcasters do,” he says. “It gives you a chance to talk about the importance of local broadcasters.”

The significance of strong stations in their communities is not lip service from Dempsey, who took on leadership at WCYB three years ago after a long career at the station across the street (WJHL). It’s a tough time for local broadcasters, being squeezed by D.C. regulators and networks alike and fighting to remain relevant in the digital age. But Dempsey is energized by the challenge. “I don’t think there’s a better job in America than being a general manager in a small-to-midsize TV station,” he says. “Every day, you’re in a position to work with the news department, with the community, with people that head up nonprofits. It’s very rewarding to see your contributions around the market.”

Rabbit Punches

Dempsey shares some of his fighting spirit with his namesake, the famed prizefighter who ruled the heavyweight class a century ago. Growing up in Kentucky, Dempsey didn’t like his name as a boy, wishing instead it was Wyatt, as in Wyatt Earp. But he grew to appreciate that his moniker brought to mind the Manassa Mauler. “It’s always been an automatic ice-breaker,” he says.

Naturally, Dempsey is asked frequently if the two are related. Tracing the shared lineage involves an awful lot of “great” prefixes, but Dempsey says there’s a blood link. “I’m told I met him,” he says of a family reunion when he was 6 months old. “Legend has it he held me for a minute.”

Dempsey got his start in radio, selling time for an AM station in Lexington, Ky. Once, while hustling to get a furniture store to commit to an ad, enticing the manager with the promise of a 6-ft.-tall stuffed bunny to boost Easter promotions, the manager stepped away from his desk, allowing Dempsey a peek at a local TV station’s rate card. The radio station offered 100 spots, plus the bunny, for $400, while WKYT-TV commanded $100 for a single 6 p.m. news spot.

“That was my epiphany,” he says.

Mentoring Sook

Dempsey landed with WKYT Lexington, and a few years later set up at WOWK in Charleston-Huntington (W. Va.), where he became general sales manager. One person he managed there was an ambitious recent college grad named Perry Sook, the founder, president and CEO of Nexstar Broadcasting. Sook recalls working on a key client for about six months before finally getting them on the hook, only to have Dempsey tell him the agreed-on ad rates would not work. Sook was pushed to work out a better deal.

“Jack was a good teacher and a great mentor,” says the Nexstar chief, considered by many the architect of station retransmission revenue. “His booming voice certainly captured people’s attention.”

Dempsey’s first GM job was at WTSF in his hometown of Ashland, Ky., and he was later named GM at WJHL in the Tri-Cities in 1989. Randy Odil, head of TV at the former Park Broadcasting, promoted Dempsey to the WJHL top spot. “Jack was level-headed, honest as can be and great with people,” says Odil, who also echoes Sook’s testimony on Dempsey as a tough boss: “He can be very demanding in terms of getting things done.”

Dempsey spent a 23 years atop WJHL, a strong CBS affiliate in the Tri-Cities (Bristol, Va.; Johnson City and Kingsport, Tenn.), but one that’s constantly in the shadows of WCYB. Three years ago, the opportunity to run WCYB came up and Dempsey seized it. “At times you wonder what else you can do with your career,” he says. “At age 61, getting a chance to go to another station and basically redefine yourself—I considered myself so fortunate.”

At Bonten-owned NBC affiliate WCYB, which also operates Fox affiliate WEMT, Dempsey says he’s more involved in news than in his previous gig. With a “Getting the Facts Right” tag line, WCYB corralled 41% of the market’s TV revenue in 2014, according to BIA/Kelsey, and is a power in every way. Local television is a unique proposition in DMA No. 97. “People identify with, and really feel like they get to know, the on-air people,” Dempsey says.

WCYB is based in Virginia, but Dempsey can see Tennessee from his office window. When he’s in Washington, that means addressing legislators from both states. It’s double duty, but he relishes the workload. “What more honorable calling is there,” Dempsey says, “than to stand up for the industry?”

Click HERE to view pdf.

Click HERE to view pdf.

Layoffs and the unrelenting pressure to produce more content with fewer people have given many journalists, never a cheery bunch in the best of times, new reasons for pessimism.

Not Andrew Morse, executive VP of editorial for CNN U.S. and general manager of CNN Digital Worldwide. While articulately dissecting many of the thorny problems facing TV news, Morse returns over and over again to the idea that new technologies and attitudes can help traditional news organizations thrive.

“I’m fond of citing…the phrase that losing generals fight the last war, not the next one,” he said. “What we need to do is aggressively embrace, from a position of strength, the fact that the business is changing and fight the next war without fear of what it means for what we did in the past.”

That willingness to embrace radical change is particularly important at CNN, which is working to revitalize its operations under the leadership of Jeff Zucker, president of CNN Worldwide.

Morse is a central figure in those efforts, with oversight of both the network’s global digital businesses and its domestic newsgathering, as well as the Washington bureau and D.C.-based programming. As 2016 election coverage heats up, CNN hopes to build on the strength of its popular digital operations, which celebrated their 20th anniversary in August, to attract new TV viewers.

“He is a rare combination of someone who has excelled in both worlds [of TV and digital] and successfully brought them together,” says Zucker, adding that those traits make Morse ideally suited “to lead CNN into the future.”

Raise Your Hand

Morse comes to that role with a lifelong love of journalism. “I can remember running around holding a lumbering VHS video camera that my grandfather gave me and trying to bang out a newspaper on my Apple IIe in elementary school,” recalls Morse.

After graduating from Cornell, where he edited the college paper, Morse unsuccessfully applied to dozens of daily newspapers. He eventually landed at ABC News as a desk assistant. “On that first job, I realized that if you raised your hand to do things no one else wanted to do, you got noticed,” Morse recalls.

That enthusiasm led to a role in 1997 with ABCNews.com, where Morse produced the first live webcast of the State of the Union address. He then had an eight-year stint overseas, first in London and then Hong Kong, working on some of the biggest international stories of era for ABC News.

“It was a marvelous odyssey,” Morse says of the experience that included professional successes—covering the USS Cole bombing in Yemen, the 2004 Asian tsunami and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—as well as a turning point in his personal life. Following a promotion to ABC Asia bureau chief, Morse met his future wife in Hong Kong (he eventually proposed to her by email from Iraq).

In 2005, the two decided to return to the States. Morse honed his skills as a producer, working as executive producer of Good Morning America’s Weekend Edition, and in digital, where he eventually oversaw ABC News’ digital portfolio. He and his wife also started a family; Morse now coaches soccer teams for both his son and daughter.

In 2011, Morse raised his hand to embark on a new challenge as head of U.S. television at Bloomberg. “We pivoted the resources and the cost structure to create an original digital video engine that could be programmed back into TV,” in effect reverse-engineering digital video for TV, he explains.

Digital First

That success brought Morse to CNN in 2013. While the network still lags significantly behind Fox News in TV ratings, CNN. com racked up 194 million video views and attracted 34 million unique viewers in July, compared to 81 million streams and 8 million unique viewers for FoxNews.com.

CNN is betting that those successes will give it a major competitive advantage during the 2016 election season. The company has been investing heavily in its digital political coverage, hiring what Morse calls an “All-Star Team” for CNN Politics, which has been the most popular digital political destination for five months running with 18 million unique visitors and some 136 million page views on desktop and mobile in July. “We are really starting to see results every day breaking news across digital and TV,” Morse notes.

“I’m fortunate enough to know what it feels like to sit in an editing room one minute from [longtime ABC News anchor] Peter Jennings going on air and being terrified that the piece won’t be ready in time,” he adds. “But the reality is that the days of rushing…to make just a 6:30 broadcast are over. The deadlines we need to meet are everywhere, and all around us.”

And that, Morse continues with characteristic optimism, “is why this is such an exciting time to be a journalist.”

Click HERE to view pdf.

Click HERE to view pdf.

Rece Davis grew up in Guin (GYOO-in), a town of 2,000 people in northwestern Alabama, surrounded by football. The first three football seasons he remembers as a kid, the local high school won back-to-back-to-back state titles. It was like something out of a Friday Night Lights episode, he says. Football “was part of the culture. I fell in love with that.”

Fascinated by the sport and the people who called the games, Davis would spend his Saturday nights spinning the radio dial, listening to every college football game he could find. At the time, he thought he would end up as a broadcaster, but only after “a long and distinguished career” playing football; alas, “my talent ran out after high school,” he says.

Now 50, Davis has already had a long and distinguished career in sports broadcasting. A 20-year ESPN veteran, Davis has been serving as a play-by-play announcer for college grid and basketball games and hosting pre-and postgame shows for the last decade. This past Saturday, he started his newest gig: host of ESPN’s College GameDay football pregame show, the most prominent morning show about the most prominent college sport.

“I don’t know if there’s a show on TV that has as strong a connection with [football] fans and fans of sports as College GameDay,” Davis says.

Calmness Amid the Storm of Live TV

In February, Davis signed a deal with ESPN through 2021 that included taking over for Chris Fowler as host of GameDay (Fowler is focusing on calling Saturday primetime college football games on ABC and tennis on ESPN).

Leading up to the start of the season, Davis admits to no nerves or apprehension, just excitement. That’s no surprise. Being unflappable is one of Davis’ greatest qualities, according to GameDay producer Lee Fitting.

Take the time years ago that Davis did football play-by-play for the first time. It was the East–West Shrine Game, the annual postseason college football all-star game. He and his analysts knew ahead of time that former President Gerald Ford would be at the stadium. They had seen him, surrounded by Secret Service agents, but were under orders not to approach him. Sometime later, out of nowhere, someone jabbed Davis in the ribs. It was Ford. So on his first football broadcast as play-by-play announcer—not just for ESPN, but ever—Davis had a former president on the air beside him. Talk about trial by fire.

“I can throw the kitchen sink at him and nothing affects him,” Fitting says. “Viewers would have no idea the level of chaos in his ear at that time. He’s so smooth.”

Davis brushes it off. He suggests his calmness might come from when he played sports as a little kid. Before games, instead of giving him technical or substantive advice, his dad would just tell him to “stay cool.”

“People at home don’t need to know nor want to know how the sausage is made,” Davis says, adding that if a light stand were to fall on the desk in front of him as he is delivering on camera, he would simply take his hand, push it away, say “we’ll get that cleaned up” and continue.

“He’s a producer’s dream,” Fitting says. “He can get you in and out of any possible scenario, segue from A to B to C as well if not better than anybody in the business.”

Letting His Teammates Score

Like any good quarterback, Davis says his top priority as a host is to put the commentators and analysts—his teammates—in the best position possible to succeed. Sometimes he disagrees with them on-air as a way to push them to validate or back up their point, “not by tossing them up softballs all the time,” Davis says, but by challenging him, poking them or clarifying them.

So when that light stand falls on set or an audience gets rowdy or some other sort of chaos ensues, Davis handles the problem for the viewers at home and for his teammates on set. No matter how famous or accomplished his analysts are, “they are taking their cues from your demeanor. If I’m rattled, uptight, flipping out, they’re likely to be uneasy,” Davis says.

It also helps that Davis is preternaturally prepared. Some hosts only know the material they are being asked to present, Fitting says, like knowing the questions to a test ahead of time and memorizing just those answers. Davis knows sports so well that it “doesn’t matter what comes up,” Fitting says.

Anyone can write up a list of questions for analysts, Davis says, but “the best hosts are part of the conversation.” And to stay involved, those hosts need to know what they are talking about and not be afraid of sharing. Davis says he considers Bob Costas and Fowler, his predecessor, among the best.

“I tell people that going from Fowler to Rece,” Fitting says, is like the 49ers going from Joe Montana to Steve Young—“one Hall of Famer to the next.”

The Dish: Minutes into meeting Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank at the hot (literally and figuratively) Studio City sushi spot Kiwami, the agility and popularity that has helped lead the longtime duo to a record number of ordered projects this year is apparent.

Kiwami is loud and packed with people, all of whom the copresidents of Amblin Television (née Dream-Works TV) seem to know. But despite our reservation, the only available seats are outside. The temperature has soared past 90 degrees. Their decision to switch locations happens in a flash of hand gestures and half-sentences: One of them points and says, “Should we—?” “Asanebo?” And we’re on our way by foot.

Before we make it out of the parking lot, CBS Entertainment chairman Nina Tassler pulls up to Kiwami. She offers hugs and glowing words about teaming up with them on Under the Dome (which wraps its three-season run Sept. 10) and Extant.

While just as conveniently located as Kiwami, Asanebo is far quieter. That’s mainly due to the fact that it’s considerably more expensive. The servers remind you “no soy sauce” as they deliver each plate of high-end Japanese fare. It’s a place the duo, who started working together 20 years ago this fall, says they reserve for special meetings and occasions. They offer several times (in vain) to pay. They know everyone here, too.

In addition to the CBS summer series, Amblin TV—cofounded by Steven Spielberg, who made the move a few years ago to self-finance the unit—has Minority Report debuting Sept. 21 on Fox; Public Morals, which premiered the night before our lunch on TNT; The Whispers on ABC; Falling Skies on TNT and The Americans on FX.

While Falvey and Frank say the company is now self-sustaining and has more in the works than ever, it’s still just a staff of 11. As far as they’re concerned, that’s an advantage.

“If you get too big, you can’t be agile,” Frank says. “Because we’re so small, as the market changes—and it feels like it’s changing every year—we’re able to sort of zig and zag and deal with it.” Kind of like their approach to where to eat lunch.

Highlights of our discussion about working together, Spielberg and the future follow.

Let’s talk about your 20-year partnership.

Frank: I’ll be married 18 years this November. And I’ve known Justin longer than I’ve known my wife. So it is a work marriage. Just like any relationship, you have to work at it, not be selfish, go out of your way.

Falvey: Because of our business, which is television production—90% of which is not in Los Angeles—we travel. We both have families, so we try to manage that. We’re never gone on weekends, but it really allows somebody to be on the ground in Atlanta or Vancouver or New York, representing us and the company and the principals of the company—Steven and Darryl and myself—and knowing that we could finish each other’s sentences. We certainly share a creative sensibility.

You talk about your partnership as being a 1+1=3. But there is of course a third person in the dynamic in Steven Spielberg. What’s your working relationship like with him?

Frank: Our barometer [for picking shows] is something we’d want to watch. We include him in that as well.…The No. 1 thing for us is what’s right for the Spielberg brand and the Amblin brand. But then there are also things that we’re super-passionate about that we go to him about that may not be good for that exact brand, and he’s very supportive with passion. If somebody can get up on the desk and say, ‘Hey, I love this show!,’ that’s what he wants.

He’s just the best boss. It sounds gushy to say it. But he is a father figure to us. He’s a friend. He’s a partner. He’s a mentor, he’s a guiding force. We look to him—even though we know his taste so well after all these years—to sort of poke holes. We say, ‘OK, here’s what we think,’ but he looks at things in a different way, because he’s Steven. So he sees things that we don’t see.

Falvey: There is a lot of trust because we’ve all been working together for so long. As Darryl said, [Spielberg’s] barometer for ideas on shows we should be pursuing–it’s things that we would watch, that could be any one of us individually. And the rest will take notice and recognize there’s something in that. Because there is an intrinsic trust over some decades of working together. He works as hard today as he did when he first started.…He will often say to us, ‘I do all my TV work before my day starts,’ which is [between] 5 and 9 in the morning or whatever it might be. He loves television. So a lot of emails. And he’s unbelievably accessible.

Frank: If we need an immediate response, we can always get it from him. We try and respect what’s going on in his life, too, and not deluge him with material and sort of do our homework before we get it to him. But there are lots of times when you do need an immediate response on a piece of casting or a new crew hire, something that’s happening. And you don’t have time to wait because TV is this moving train—he gets that because he started in TV.

Falvey: He understands the complexities and the difficulties and the challenges, creatively and financially. It’s a privilege for us to work with him and help manage what he’s built and hopefully expand upon that. He’s been an incredible partner, or boss.

Frank: He’s just working on another level. So we try and use that, but not abuse it.

What does the next chapter look like for you?

Frank: The market forces change so much, with international being so strong. The digital networks being sort of the secondary window, the secondary revenue stream. Your risks for cofinancing shows have gone down a lot, and that’s something that we’ve been exploring. Opportunities to maybe take some bets on certain shows where we’re not just fee-based producers for hire. Maybe we put some money in on our own. It’s something we’re talking about. No decisions have been made, but we’ve had a lot of different companies that have reached out to us.

Falvey: Kind of expanding beyond just the producer business. Because we are already situated to do that, and in an ever-changing environment, because we’re an independent company and the world is changing. You can’t control the distribution system…but you can control the content that you’re putting out. That’s first and foremost.

Then it’s our job to understand how all of those things work so that we could be as smart and strategic and allow that content to thrive in the best possible way, place or form but never lose sight of what’s sitting in front of you. Just pure production, which starts with an idea and coming back to the basics. I think that’s what we love most.

It’s still exciting to have a seed of an idea and see that, over the course of what’s a very short time, become a show and then see that on air. That is still something that I think we both jump out of bed at the prospect. That never gets old to me.

Falvey and Frank elaborated on why their longstanding partnership works, working with Spielberg and how the proliferation of programming is changing the business. Here are highlights:

On their longstanding partnership---

Falvey and Frank say their friendship and similar taste are keys to their successful partnership.

Falvey: When we started, we were in this temporary space. We didn’t have all of our offices. And I was in this massive office the size of this restaurant. And there was no space for him. He started two weeks after I did – and they were putting him in a cubicle.

We went out to dinner and I said, ‘Just move your desk in.’ We were meeting writers. We literally put our desks kitty-corner to each other.

Frank: It was partner desks from day one.

Falvey: Yeah, that was kind of the beginning of it.

Frank: And then when we built out an office …. We built out a floor for the television company and we had offices next to each other and we built a sliding glass door between our offices, which we always kept open. A French door. I don’t think we ever had it closed, because we always did our meetings together.

Falvey: And it’s a great system of checks and balances. Somebody may be more passionate about something or believe in something more. Or somebody could say, ‘Am I crazy to be thinking this way? What’s your sense of that?’ We work off each other in that respect, which is great in a creative business that can be so subjective to have just another opinion, somebody who knows you and saying, ‘This is worth fighting for. You may want to think about approaching it this way.’

Frank: Somebody to have your back. You know, there are a lot of times where there will be creative conversations and there are a lot of people talking. To have somebody to be able to sell your point of view as well, so it’s not just you doing it, it’s always good to have that sort of backup.

Falvey: I think that’s why it works. We complement each other well. Because he could say, ‘No, this is an issue,’ or, ‘It’s not an issue.’ It’s literally kind of looking at – despite the similarities we have, we can approach things in a different respect.

Frank: There’s always people who go, ‘Who’s good cop and who’s bad cop?’ Because it’s constantly changing depending on who has a real strong point of view about something and if one person has a really strong point of view, the other person sort of backs up and goes, ‘Go with it! I'm there for you!’

But it’s not something you can always predict, who is going to be good cop or bad cop in certain situations. … You know who is better at what stuff and who likes to do what stuff better. You have to be self-aware of what you're good at and what your partner is better at.

There are relatively few longtime partnerships like yours in the business, Dana Walden and Gary Newman at Fox, a number of writing teams. Why do you think there aren’t more partnerships like yours in the business?

Falvey: I think they’re hard to come by. In order for them to work, I think the one thing you see consistently with any partnership that does work is that, not surprisingly, it has been a long-standing partnership.

And often, I think the partnerships that work the best are when people complement each other and when they’ve kind of grown up and risen through the ranks together as opposed to a forced marriage.

This was something we took on ourselves and decided to work together. Our philosophy was, literally from the beginning 20 years ago, saying, ‘We’re going to get a lot further working together than competing and backstabbing.’ And it was a genuine friendship and it’s respecting that person.

Frank: Even when we were junior executives, when we started making our first deals, we hired the same lawyer and we basically told them, ‘We’re going to make our deal together. Whatever you pay him you're going to pay me and vice versa.’

We’re doing the same job anyway, we didn’t want to have anything that could put a wedge in between us. So every time we would negotiate our deal, we would negotiate together. We had our own individual deal, but the terms mirrored each other. … The other thing that I think is key to us is we’re friends. We like the same things, so we have the same taste. … We like the same restaurants. We like the same music. We grew up around the same time, so we have the same interests and stuff like that.

So that while we complement each other, we have the same taste so I think that’s one of the keys to a long partnership, too, is like if you like different things then eventually one partner is going to want to go do something else.

Why Steven Spielberg is “the best boss”--

Spielberg’s responsiveness, passion for TV and “humanity” are among the facets that Falvey and Frank say they appreciate and admire about their boss.

Frank: We use (Spielberg) as a sounding board. … a lot of times he’s our objective opinion. He has a great objective opinion. There are times where we’ve got shows already picked up or they’re already going and then we call it ‘sprinkling his pixie dust on it.’

We’ll bring the writers in or we’ll bring the director in or the production designer or the DP and we’ll do a presentation for him. And he’s probably adding three or four things in that meeting that are the things that the writers are like, ‘We have to write that into the show!’ or the director’s like, ‘I have to do that shot!’

Falvey: It’s always amazing to watch how accessible he is. And he’s remained obviously at the top of the game and is relevant as he is because he watches and reads everything. I mean you could talk to him about any TV show, the odds are he’s probably seen it and he doesn’t forget anything. You can talk about it and reference shows from the past and different influences. He's mostly – he’s a big fan of TV and it shows in his approach.

Frank: The other thing is being a great family man. He carves out time for his family so while he works really hard and we work really hard and we email back and forth on weekends and at nights. If you were to ever say to him, ‘Oh, I'm at my son’s baseball game,’ or ‘I need to do this.’ He’s totally respectful of that. … He’s a great person with great morals and ethics. Always does the right thing, which is really important to us too and how we run our business. Even if something could be a better deal but it’s not doing the right thing, we don’t do that because we’re a representation of him and that’s how we live our lives too. So it’s great to work with somebody – he always does the right thing. He really does.

Falvey: It’s a high bar to live up to, but it’s something we’re really fortunate to have in our lives. We don’t take it lightly. We truly don’t.

The impact of the proliferation of original programming on Amblin TV’s business --

Taking stock 20 years into their partnership and as a new TV season begins, Falvey and Frank say the biggest factor changing the game right now is the huge amount of programming being made.

Frank: I think (one of the biggest challenges is) getting a show to stay, because there are so many different shows.

It’s what (FX Networks chief John) Landgraf said. You can’t just have a good show anymore; you have to have a great show. Or even what Roy Price has been saying at Amazon: You have to be somebody’s favorite show. I agree with both of those things totally, because all of us at this table have a DVR filled with stuff that we love that we can’t even get to. ‘Oh, I'm on episode seven of this and I've got to try this other new show because I heard it was great!’ We like to sample everything.

Finding a way to be somebody’s favorite show and then having the network get it out there and let it grow to be somebody’s favorite show.

Falvey: And the target is changing in terms of analyzing the overnights and the L3s and the L7s. It takes months now to aggregate all that information and have an understanding of the economic impact, the impact it means to a brand as a network and producers. ... It’s a long-term game now that you have to play and really take a step back.

For us as a company specifically what we talk about in terms of managing our business is making sure we’re … not spreading ourselves too thin, because we don’t have the resource for it nor do we want to. And to maintain our reputation, which is quality over quantity. We have a specific brand and taste and people expect a certain product to come through the door and a guarantee of the delivery of that and the quality.

Frank: And that’s the other thing, is the talent. And not just actors, but it’s showrunners, it’s writers, it’s directors, it’s DPs, it’s production.

There is so much production going on right now. We’re shooting Minority Report in Vancouver. There are 55 other shows shooting up there. Even getting a driver is difficult to get. When we were shooting in Atlanta there were 35 shows shooting at the same time. To build our set, we couldn’t even get carpenters.

On entertainment, the family business

Frank’s father, Rich Frank, was an executive at Paramount and Disney. Falvey is married to Samie Kim Falvey, executive VP, Comedy Development and International Scripted Development, ABC Entertainment Group, so they both literally work in the family business.

Frank: I kind of learned through osmosis watching him [Frank’s dad]. He was at Paramount from ’74 to ’84, which is like, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, Cheers, Family Ties, Entertainment Tonight. ... I would watch the rough cuts with my dad and stuff like that and I do that with my daughter now too.

Falvey: And your Halloween costumes. Want to mention that?

Frank: Oh yeah, when he was at Paramount, that movie The Warriors came out.

To be like the Warriors or the Baseball Furies was like the coolest thing to do.

Scott Marshal is a friend of mine. Garry Marshall, his father, wrote Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, all that kind of stuff. So we used to hang out. We went to school together. We used to play the Warriors, a group of us would be the Baseball Furies and the other group would be the Warriors.

So one day he shows up with the actual vest from Swan. The leather vest. I said, ‘Where’d you get that?’ He goes, ‘Oh, my dad got it from the wardrobe department at Paramount.’ All of us said, ‘That’s the real vest! Oh my god!’

But I just learned that it’s a privilege to work in this business and we all could be doing other things but we make television. We make entertainment for a living. I learned from him, really, work ethic. Work hard. Even though you’re privileged to be doing it, you have to work your butt off in this business to succeed because there are a lot of really talented people, and people that can out-work you.

Falvey: To his credit, he has accomplished that and carved out his own niche in that respect– he’s truly become his own man. We always joke (to Rich Frank) – ‘Oh, you’re Darryl Frank’s dad!’

Frank: As opposed to Rich Frank’s kid. He loves telling that story. He’s so proud of everything.

And then of course this is a family business for you as well with your wife, Samie. Do you work together much and how do you handle that?

Falvey: We have. What’s how we met. We met working on Undeclared when we had the deal with Judd Apatow, had Freaks and Geeks. And we produced Undeclared at Fox. She was the current exec on that show. But we’ve had, over the years, shows we’ve developed, series produced there [ABC]. There have been moments where I’ve said, ‘You need to make this call. You need to be this call. I can’t.’ For both Samie and I, you just step away.

There are obviously real advantages to that in that you have an understanding of what these jobs require and time wise, so we can balance. We have two little children– that’s the most important thing for us. And it’s prioritizing and making sure somebody is home every night at dinner and we’ll look at your week and say, ‘All right if you’ve got a dinner on Thursday, I'm free that night.’

And then also, when you have to go to a work function, it’s not as painful for the other spouse because you know everybody there.

I'm sure there are times, like upfronts, every year where you are both gone, right?

Falvey: Well, we bring our family, our kids to New York. That’s actually been fun. They are little enough that we bring them there. My in-laws are there.

Frank: It’s always over Mother’s Day, too. I remember that from growing up. My dad was always away for Mother’s Day, and I am too. The same with my wife and kids – they always come to New York. The Sunday before that week is Mother’s Day. So usually, they are there on that Sunday, but you want to be there for the Monday announcement. So that’s great for them.

Falvey: My in-laws have an apartment in Midtown right next to Carnegie Hall, and my kids will stay there. My mother in law could not be happier, and she’ll say, ‘See you later!’ and Samie and I will get a hotel. We stay at the Parker Meridien so we’re next door. We can run in and run out and that becomes a really fun week. We can see our kids and they’re having the time of their life and getting spoiled by their grandmother and they both love New York. 

Click HERE to view pdf.

This has been another dream year in a fantasy-like career for ESPN sportscaster Chris Fowler. He has called national and international championships in his two favorite sports, college football and tennis, and now is on an assignment for the ages—being behind the mic at the U.S. Open starting today to cover Serena Williams’ quest for tennis’ first singles Grand Slam in 27 years.

“In terms of documenting an achievement, it would be the most amazing thing I’ve seen,” says Fowler, who has spent nearly three decades covering a wide world of sports from high school games to World Cup matches. “Any Grand Slam event is a piece of tennis history. When you add on to it what Serena could achieve and put it in New York in the biggest tennis stadium in the world, it’s hard to imagine anything more. There will be a wild scene—it will be electric.”

Fowler has a chance to help lay down the soundtrack for potential sports history because ESPN is beginning an 11-year deal for start-to-finish coverage of the Open, ending CBS’ 47- year run at the Flushing, N.Y., fortnight. Fowler, who covered early-round Open matches for ESPN the past six years, will be in the booth three additional days (for a total of 10) and call three more matches (18 total) than last year.

But he will break away this weekend for his other big gig, as play-by-play guy on ESPN’s Saturday primetime, college football games on ABC, heading to Arlington, Texas, to cover Alabama vs. Wisconsin.

Fowler then will fly back East to call the Ohio State-Virginia Tech game on ESPN Labor Day evening before returning to New York for the last six days of the Open, including the women’s championship Saturday afternoon, Sept. 12, and the men’s final Sunday afternoon, Sept. 13.

Fowler will skip the Sept. 12 Oregon- Michigan State grid game to be at the Open. “It’s very important for me to call the finals,” he says. “For years I’ve eyeballed that booth, so finally it is kind of a dream to be able to do it.”

Fowler has called two of Williams’ three major tournament wins this year, the Australian Open and Wimbledon. A title in New York, along with her French Open trophy, would make Williams the first singles player to win all four majors in a calendar year—the Grand Slam—since Steffi Graf in 1988.

The Game’s the Thing

Fowler built his success as a host but has gradually gravitated back to his first love, play-by-play, which he fell hard for growing up in Rockford, Ill., listening to fabled Chicago sportscasters Lloyd Pettit and Jack Brick-house.

“Calling games always has been my passion, never reading scores or highlights,” he says.

About 95% of his tennis workload now is play-by-play, and although he would like to mix in some hosting at the Open, he’s hesitant to because of the unpredictable length of matches.

Fowler knows all about that. He and analyst Patrick McEnroe called the longest Grand Slam final in history, 5 hours and 53 minutes, between winner Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal at the 2012 Australian Open.

“I’m a little bit claustrophobic,” Fowler says, “so sometimes a tennis booth is not a comfortable place to be unless the action out the window is really fun and exciting. Then you forget about what a small space you’re in.”

Longtime ESPN executive John A. Walsh and other key talent evaluators considered Fowler a keeper early in his career and gave him his big break in 1990, tapping him to host weekly college football pregame show College GameDay.

“It soon became obvious to everyone that he was made for hosting, he was made for college sports, that he understood it all,” says Walsh, who retired this year as ESPN executive editor and senior VP. “Chris is very smart, very contemporary. He’s a student of everything that he does and is in a perpetual state of learning.”

Fowler hosted the award-winning GameDay road show for 25 years, turning over the role this year to Rece Davis. “I’ll miss it terribly. I’m not sure how easy it will be to be involved in the show, or even watch it,” Fowler says. “It’s a huge part of my life, and I’ll never have anything again like that. GameDay was a labor of love, something we built from the ground up.”

After Fowler replaced Brent Musburger last year in the Saturday-night football booth, it became difficult to juggle play-by-play and GameDay. One had to go, and the choice was clear to Fowler when ESPN offered him a nine-year contract as lead college football and tennis announcer for a reported $35 million.

“It’s been a tremendous run on GameDay, but I was offered the chance for a new challenge,” Fowler says. “College football and the playoffs is hugely important for the company, so there wasn’t any doubt what was best for me to do.”

In addition to finding fame and fortune at ESPN, Fowler met his wife, Jennifer Dempster, who appeared on the network’s ’90s exercise show BodyShaping. They are ardent travelers; France is one of Fowler’s favorite spots, and it’s where he proposed on the final day of the 1999 Tour de France. The couple married a year later.

“Travel is a passion and a hobby, and it’s a never-ending quest,” Fowler says. “As long as I’m able, we’ll be trotting around.”

Tennis is another of Fowler’s passions. He played frequently as a youngster and now considers himself just a recreational player, although he ventured into the big time a few years ago when he stepped onto a court at Wimbledon with one of the game’s heaviest hitters, top-ranked American John Isner.

Fowler was watching Isner, whose serves have been clocked at just shy of 150 miles per hour, practicing and told the 6-foot-10 pro he’d like to face his serve so he could describe it better on the air.

Fowler, wearing jeans and a hoodie at the hallowed tennis grounds where all-white attire is the law, grabbed a racket and braced for serves unlike anything he had ever faced. “The first two were down middle to my backhand, absolutely untouchable,” Fowler recalls. “Then I said, ‘Give me your fastball to my forehand.’”

Isner obliged, blasting one in the 130 mph range. Fowler, anticipating where the ball was headed, made contact, returning a shot back Isner’s way. The ball was pretty close to making it over the net, but hit the tape at the top and dropped back onto Fowler’s side—a success nevertheless.

“I was very proud to even make solid contact with it,” Fowler says.

Click HERE to view pdf.

Mike Hopkins doesn’t descend from Hollywood royalty. He didn’t do a stint at McKinsey & Co. or launch a start-up out of his college dorm room. Sun Valley is familiar turf, but it’s not home.

What Hopkins has done, relentlessly, better than most, is straight-up work. He has applied his curious mind and a rare knack for building consensus, ascending through the TV business while pulling off the feat of being both accomplished and approachable. Widely respected during his 18-year career at Fox, where he steered the distribution troops through game-changing launches and thorny negotiations, he has always learned by doing. And now he gets daily lessons as CEO of Hulu, a post he has held since October 2013.

“Almost everything” about the Hulu role has been brand-new to him, Hopkins readily admits. “A typical day for me has so much variety,” he says. “Distribution is a part of what we do, but now I go from marketing to programming to the technology.

“At Fox, every year it was something new,” he adds, recalling rollouts of video-on-demand, TV Everywhere and regional sports nets. “I do get a charge out of launching new products.”

A lot of top executives whose purview expands just fake it till they make it. (Emphasis on “fake it.”) The self-made essence of Hopkins makes him seemingly incapable of the megalomania and bluffing that predominates in the industry.

“He is disarmingly unassuming,” says Michael Biard, who worked for Hopkins for 10-plus years at Fox Networks and is now president of distribution. “He’s not pretentious, and he doesn’t put on a lot of airs. That enables him to comfortably rub elbows with all manner of folks and put them at ease.”

Hopkins doesn’t recall being an especially avid TV viewer during his childhood in San Diego. Regular doses of The Dukes of Hazzard, maybe, “no more or less than anyone else.”

Still, something happened one fateful day in the Hopkins household.

“I distinctly remember when we got cable,” he says. “My parents added a family room over our garage. And we had HBO. I remember thinking, ‘We have all these movies!’”

It would take a while before that fascination with video delivery would become Hopkins’ daily work, but the dots connected along the way were not insignificant. After graduating from Cal State Long Beach (he would later earn an MBA at UCLA), Hopkins went to work in sales for Harte Hanks, then a media company known for hawking shoppers and PennySavers.

Restless after five years of old-school sales, Hopkins jumped at the chance to join the Weather Channel just as cable was starting to blossom. “From the second I started, I loved it,” he recalls. “Original content basically didn’t exist outside of news and sports. Cable was nascent and growing and really exciting.” His early niche: affiliate sales and marketing.

Hard-Won Wisdom

When Hopkins moved to Fox a few years later, original content was in a full-on boom. One of his first projects was securing distribution for a new network known as FX. His run in Century City would also be marked by bruising showdowns with multichannel video programming distributors and, later, the Fox station affiliates that were added to his purview in a restructuring.

“There were several times we had multiple high-profile deals going at the same time,” Biard says. “That’s when you really see the measure of the man. He has the ability to really see things from the other side and is never afraid to ask what may seem like an obvious question. He’s also never afraid to look at things from a different angle.”

This isn’t subordination or yielding of the high ground, Biard adds. “He has a tremendous amount of self-confidence. And that comes from an ability to distill things down.”

Along the way, Hopkins would serve on the boards of the Big Ten Network, Nat Geo and, fatefully, Hulu. His board post there made him a known commodity for the stakeholders and a strong leadership bet in the wake of a turbulent period when the service was shopped and then pulled back off the market.

Hulu has grown in its seven-plus years into a well-funded challenger to Netflix and Amazon, with 9 million subscribers. It has a war chest, writing nine-figure checks for streaming rights to Seinfeld and South Park and commissioning big-ticket originals including the J.J. Abrams-Stephen King event series 11/22/63. In all, 130 individual shows are now available on Hulu. Under Hopkins, Hulu has been active, ditching the “Plus” from its subscription offering and reportedly exploring an ad-free tier at a higher monthly fee.

If the company is running a marathon, though, “I don’t think we’ve hit the first water station,” Hopkins says. “We’re in the second or third mile,” with a huge advantage for the coming era when “the vast majority of content will be distributed via IP.”

Hopkins’ mission now is not unlike those in the distribution trenches—he is still preaching the gospel of working together. “I want to create an environment where people can row in the same direction,” he says. “I know that how you build consensus is, you can’t just dictate it.”

Click HERE to view PDF.

Much of Jon Hookstratten’s Job involves hammering out agreements with Fox’s litany of distribution partners amid the ever- changing rules of network engagement. It makes for some tense negotiations, but Hookstratten learned from the best. Son of the late, legendary entertainment lawyer Ed Hookstratten, Jon absorbed his father’s debate style as a kid, and later when they were law firm partners. The senior Hookstratten, known as the Hook, could be blustery and intimidating. The junior Hookstratten developed his own style of getting to yes.

“He stuck by his clients through thick and through thin,” says Hookstratten. “But I learned that you can’t always be like that. In today’s world, you’ve got to be able to understand everybody’s side of the situation.”

A key part of being executive VP of network distribution is keeping more than 200 affiliated stations happy. While Fox and its partner stations have feuded bitterly at times in the past, with the network pushing hard to maximize retransmission returns, it’s difficult to scare up a negative word about the low-key Hookstratten among the station representatives. “When Jon comes back to deliver a message from the network, it may not be something we like to hear,” says Jeff Rosser, Fox affiliates board chairman and group VP at Raycom. “But he can deliver that message better than anybody I know. He takes time to explain things, and we’ll debate with mutual respect.”

The King and I

Hookstratten is a true child of Los Angeles. His father’s clients included Johnny Carson, Tom Brokaw and several top-shelf Los Angeles news anchors. His mother, Patricia Crowley, played the mom in the ’60s family comedy Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, among other TV and film roles. “All of our friends were clients or people from the entertainment business,” he says.

That included a certain hip-shaking southern entertainer. Hookstratten figures he was around 7 years old when he met Elvis Presley. “My parents brought him into my bedroom,” he recalls. “They knew it was important to have him meet us.”

Hookstratten knew early on that his future was in show business. After getting his law degree, he signed on with the holding company McAndrews and Forbes, serving as right-hand man to fabled financier Ronald Perelman. He then moved on to his father’s law firm, working with news, sports and entertainment clients and handling business affairs for Johnny Carson’s Carson Productions.

Hookstratten witnessed the obvious respect between his father and the entertainment titans and news chiefs he battled with on behalf of his clients. Even when negotiations got intense, and they often did, those adversaries were frequent guests at the Hookstratten home for cocktails and dinner. “Those people were his friends,” Hookstratten says of his dad.

Through his law work, Jon attained a certain comfort level with local TV execs that served him well as he embarked on his career’s next phase. Ed Wilson, then president of CBS Enterprises, knew Jon through his father and hired him in 1996 as senior VP of business affairs, with oversight of the division’s domestic distribution. When Wilson moved to NBC, Hookstratten was his first hire. And when Wilson was named network president at Fox, Hookstratten followed a short while later as executive VP of distribution.

Wilson recalls that he wanted someone with deep understanding of the television business and a unique perspective. “Jon is just an incredible team-builder,” says Wilson, now a co-owner in the digital studio New Form. “He’s extremely fair, and people like working for him.”

Hookstratten cites Wilson and Tony Vinciquerra, former Fox Networks CEO, as key figures in making him a complete television executive. “Ed makes you believe anything is possible, and Tony is the practical, feeton- the-ground person,” says Hookstratten. “The two guys balanced my life out.”

Balance is a word that comes up frequently when people discuss Hookstratten—a man who works for a powerful television network in Los Angeles but enjoys visiting station folks in small markets; whose idea of a flashy vacation is an RV road trip to a national park with his wife and children; and who never lets ego get in the way of a robust negotiation. “Old-school integrity,” is how one prominent Fox affiliate exec puts it.

“You rarely see Jon lose his cool,” says Raycom’s Rosser. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.”

One might suspect a degree of entitlement from a kid who grew up around Hollywood royalty, but that does not seem to be the case. Says Hookstratten with a laugh: “My sister and I ended up being the most normal, boring people you can imagine.”

Click HERE to view pdf.

Click HERE to view pdf.

When the fox crews are all set at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park for the MLB All-Star Game on July 14, it will be something of a roundingthe- bases, full-circle moment for John Entz. The president/production and executive producer for Fox Sports was 7 when he attended his first baseball game, seeing Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” take on the Padres in San Diego.

“Seeing guys live that happened to be the best team in the world at the time was pretty memorable,” he says. “I still have the ticket, I think.”

Entz is bound to see some familiar faces at this week’s game. One of the big All-Star draws will be the revealing of the fan-voted “Franchise Four” squads (the greatest four players in each team’s history), along with the vote winners for the four greatest living veterans. With the game in Cincinnati—and controversial all-time hits champ Pete Rose part of the Fox talent crew—some of that old Machine’s finest should be represented.

“You always try to build in extra pieces [for the All-Star Game] that might draw in the more casual fan,” says Entz of the Franchise idea. “But the game on the field is the most important thing.”

The game has always been the thing for Entz, from when he played baseball growing up in Las Vegas and Arizona to setting the foundation for a stellar career in sports TV as video manager for the University of Arizona’s powerhouse basketball team. The UA coaches had connections at ESPN and helped get an interview for Entz in 1993. He traveled to Bristol…and didn’t make a great showing. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe I flew across the country and blew my chance for the one job I wanted all my life,’” he recalls. But ESPN did like what they saw, and a few months later, the call came. “I had just started training to work in the country’s first P.F. Chang’s, in Scottsdale, Ariz.,” Entz says. “I didn’t make it to the opening.”

Instead, Entz has helped engineer a slew of other prominent openings, as well as logging solid and award-winning time in the sports TV field. At ESPN, he helped produce SportsCenter and won an Emmy. Joining Fox in 1996, he produced the All-Star Game red carpet show and college football Bowl Championship Series pregame specials. Entz also had two experiences that stretched his range—as a producer on Season 2 of American Idol and running point for The Best Damn Sports Show Period.

“Idol was so different from anything I’d done before,” he says of helping judge early-round singers before they got to Simon, Paula and Randy. “It was pretty amazing to see from the inside what a No. 1 show looked like and how it was run.” As for BDSSP, Entz recalls, “The great part was it allowed you to do almost anything you could creatively.”

Entz put all his experience to best use as senior VP production for the then-launching MLB Network in 2008, hiring a staff and overseeing the look and presentation of studio programming and game coverage. That first summer, he conducted job interviews every 20 minutes. “I think I lost my voice saying the same things over and over,” he says. “But it was our goal to get a great group of people that collectively knew it wasn’t going to be easy, creating the systems and processes that would for the most part be in place for the rest of the time the network was on the air.”

He returned to Fox in 2011; Fox Sports president/COO Eric Shanks is happy to have him back. “John has an infectious enthusiasm for telling stories, and a great eye for hiring very good people in front of and behind the camera to tell those stories,” Shanks says of the 2012 B&C Next Wave of Leaders honoree. “And he’s a player-coach—everything he’s in charge of, he’s done at one time or another.”

Now he shares his sports passion with the next generation. Entz and his wife have three daughters, the oldest of whom plays soccer and went with her dad to Vancouver, B.C., to see the USA’s victory in the Women’s World Cup final on July 5. “It’s been a really great time to bond with her,” Entz says.

THE DISH: Amid the wave of acquisitions and consolidation in the production community, Jenny Daly, who has created, sold and produced more than 50 series, pilots and presentations since establishing T Group Productions in 2010, remains one of the few true independents.

A rare reality TV pro, having been an in-the-field executive producer, a buyer as an exec at E! and for last few years an entrepreneur running her own indie production company, she said she’s seen people sell their production companies time and again for the wrong reasons (well, one wrong reason): money.

“Money doesn’t bring you happiness,” Daly said just ahead of the Independence Day holiday over traditional Mexican fare at La Cabaña. The restaurant is a family favorite in her Venice, Calif., neighborhood. “What does is a business that is running in a way that you feel is strengthening and prosperous and has momentum.”

It’s no coincidence that the power of money to motivate is on Daly’s mind at lunch. The night before, she returned to L.A. from Ohio, where she shot the final episode of reality series Wicked Offer, which debuts Aug. 5 on The CW. The show challenges people to consider what they would do for a windfall.

In the last year, Daly forged a series of strategic coproduction partnerships to continue growing T Group, which is behind Food Network’s Mystery Diners, Storage Hunters (formerly on truTV, currently going strong in the U.K., recently sold in France and in negotiations to air in Germany), truTV’s Container Wars and History’s Invention USA.

Recent copro deals include pacts with Jack Osbourne’s Osbourne Media (they are rebooting The Osbournes together), Canadian producers Matthew Kershaw and Jay Kovitz’s Interior Day Entertainment (providing a natural path to a larger Canadian presence for T Group), Ann Lewis Roberts’ Roberts Media (Daly notes Roberts’ strength with talent and packaging of network shows as a great addition) and British producers Natalka Znak and Simon Jones and their Znak&Jones (providing added entry to the U.K. market as Storage Hunters continues to do well there). Several of her collaborators are relocating to her L.A. offices, where she likes to keep a “family-run” atmosphere, welcoming the staff’s dogs and bringing in breakfast once a week.

Over guacamole made table side and other classics, Daly spoke about the future of the reality genre and what it takes to thrive as an independent in this era of consolidation. Edited highlights of the conversation follow.

What’s the concept of Wicked Offer?

It’s basically, ‘What would you do for money?’ And in the end, who would you put in a situation that would jeopardize your relationships for money?

The greatest thing about it is in every episode, what’s really been clear to everyone who has participated is that money isn’t worth it.

What do you think the next big thing is in reality? Is it social experiments like this?

The shows that I think are prevailing are the ones where you know there’s maybe a formula— or concept, or framework—that you have bought into, but everything that transpires is true to life.

We had no idea what was going to happen this weekend (shooting Wicked Offer). We had a framework, but we don’t know how the couples are going to respond.

How much opportunity do you see for the reality genre in the digital world?

Everybody is interested in digital. I’m a content creator. So my content can live anywhere. But digital is very different (from linear networks), of course, because they don’t have a time slot they have to fill. They don’t have an amount of hours that they have to program for. It’s a matter of figuring out content that resonates with an audience and a reason why they want to watch it.

Are you finding the opportunities in so-called digital can be as lucrative at this point as they are among linear networks?

Reality has not aggressively fed into the digital platforms yet as a financial moneymaker. A lot of times they want condensed reality for a less amount of money, but it’s growing and adapting.

But truth be said…we know that networks are going to become like an app. [We will] click on “Lifetime,” for example, and see their programs. So you’ll still be creating programs for Lifetime, you’re just not necessarily eventually going to watch it as a linear outlet. You’re going to watch it as that app, as a brand, and under it will be shows.

You and Jack Osbourne are working together on the new version of The Osbournes, which I understand is not going forward at VH1, after you were working on that with them. What’s happening with the show?

We’re in the midst of putting a deal together. We were going to go to VH1, but that deal couldn’t be closed, which was unfortunate.

We’re looking at kind of a multitude of outlets of how to reapproach it, and we actually have another project with some of the family members that is really a fun project that we just recently sold. Instead of just The Osbournes as a sole focus, we actually have different members doing different projects as well. And that’s fun. [Editor’s Note: A lifestyle format with Sharon Osbourne and a concept in the travel historical arena with Jack and Ozzy Osbourne are both in the works in addition to The Osbournes reboot, but Daly was mum on the network homes while the projects are being finalized.]

How is the hustle as an entrepreneur different from your other gigs in the business as an EP and a network exec?

I’ve never really been somebody who has done a ton of jobs working for other people. I’ve actually worked for myself a lot. I started in college working with ESPN on their Senior PGA Tour as a kind of freelancer, so it would be my choice as to what jobs I took or didn’t take.

The difference as a network executive is that you are very much focused on a very specific brand. And you have a big, moving engine that is a lot of parts that you have to be accountable for. It teaches you what it really takes to make a TV show, and all of the entities that are involved in the decision- making.

Great insight as a seller.

Amazing insight! I’m so grateful I had it.

The pressures that are different are you’re getting a paycheck from somebody else, so you’re not always hoping to God that this sells, that sells.…The pressures being an executive are, Will a new boss come in? Will I be liked? Will I be somebody who is going to last here? Am I somebody who is getting the hit show that I’m getting the recognition for?

If you’re in a network and you don’t get a hit show, then it’s a little less, I would say, hurtful than as a producer not getting a hit show. Because then it’s yours, you take it on. Where at the network, it is ‘Oh, it’s another one I did.’ And they have many going on for them at that network.

What has surprised you most since establishing T Group?

What surprised me is what growth means. As you grow, it becomes more and more complicated. You would think that growth and success would be like, ‘Yeah, I’m doing great!’ That’s when life becomes harder. When you have to take on more and you have to maintain. And there are people you are accountable for at this point. And there are monies going out that are significant. And the level of decisions that you make on a day to day-to-day basis is immense.

You’re the only one keeping yourself up every day. Nobody is out there really championing you but you. And I don’t have a partner I can say to, ‘I’m feeling like shit today. How do you feel?’

You could have a partner. I know you’ve been approached for mergers or acquisition. To this point, you haven’t taken anybody up on that. What would an offer need to look like for you to say yes? I think it really comes down to aligning with somebody who brings more to the table than I am doing myself. And there are a lot of great companies out there. But it also feels like we’re in a shifting time in our business, so I think I want to shift and make sure my feet are planted well before I align them with somebody else.…I want to be in the best place I can be, which is why I am bringing more people on, which is why I’m aligning (with coproducing partners) and growing and building, so that as I come together with somebody else, it’s a bigger conglomerate.

What’s the most important thing you think you need to do to grow and adjust with the times as an independent?

Being aware and being unafraid to jump. I think as a company, I jumped. I think that is the biggest way to be successful in this kind of state. We just actually sold a digital show, scripted. It’s shifting and growing and taking on different areas that are out of your comfort zone. And I think that to me as a company has been the most scary, but most rewarding.

IFC late-night spoof Comedy Bang! Bang! returns July 9 and host/creator Scott Aukerman will have Michael Cera as his guest and welcome Kid Cudi, hip-hop star and actor, as his new sidekick.

But despite the impressive roster of celebs who have dropped by over the show’s first few seasons, he’s tending the flame for the ultimate guest, someone with a bit more availability lately: David Letterman. It was Letterman who first inspired Aukerman to take up comedy. His off-kilter reinvention of the talk show is the biggest influence on Bang! Bang!. But even though Letterman recently signed off as a latenight host, a hopeful Aukerman is, one might say, realistic about his possibilities of finding his idol across from him for a chat. “There is no chance in hell he would ever do it,” says Aukerman, who adds that Letterman is the biggest” influence on the show. “That is the great white whale of guests.”

From the Stage to the Screen

Much like Letterman’s evolving show, Comedy Bang! Bang! went through a few different versions on its way to television, first starting as a weekly showcase for stand-ups and sketch performers at Los Angeles’ UCB theater; it was then called “Comedy Death-Ray.”

A friend of Aukerman’s who worked as a DJ at a radio station told him they were looking for someone to do a show. It was there Aukerman established the format of what Comedy Bang! Bang! would become—one celebrity, plus another comedian playing a character, all set up as a fake talk show.

“There is something very interesting and unique about the reaction between a celebrity and a comedian playing a fake character,” he says. “I thought it would be really funny.”

Aukerman then turned it into a podcast as part of his Earwolf podcast network he cofounded in 2010—his wife and fellow comedian Kulap Vilaysack cohosts the film-centric “Who Charted?” podcast on Earwolf. IFC became interested in 2011 and turned it into a TV show.

Christine Lubrano, IFC senior VP of original programming, says that Aukerman and Comedy Bang! Bang! fit right in with the network’s off-kilter sensibilities. “[The guests] come to have fun in a way that you can’t do on a traditional talk show,” she says. “That environment is entirely created by Scott.”

That environment will change a bit with the departure of Aukerman’s sidekick, Reggie Watts, now bandleader for James Corden on CBS’ The Late Late Show. “I was first a little bummed,” says Aukerman. “I wanted the show to go on forever with the same people.” But he sees Cudi as a good replacement. “He doesn’t really have to do this show,” jokes Aukerman, who likes that Cudi brings a different style than Watts, who was known for his dry wit and deadpan responses. “He’s not the accomplished comedian Reggie Watts is,” says Aukerman, but his energy will bring something different.

Now Aukerman is hoping the show will have a different vibe when it returns, to go along with its new set and theme song. “When Reggie left I kind of viewed it as a real cool opportunity to almost reboot the show.”

A Comedic Turn

Like many comedians, Aukerman initially didn’t think he would able to hack it trying to make others laugh. “I had always grown up loving comedy but never really thought I could do it professionally,” he says. “It just seemed like this incredible hurdle to attempt.”

After a brief stint as a musical theater actor, he moved back to Los Angeles—he grew up in Orange County—to try writing. Through a mutual friend, Aukerman landed a spot on a comedy show (along with his friend and frequent collaborator B.J. Porter) that was being put on by Mary Lynn Rajskub. The second night he performed, Bob Odenkirk—who was busy with his HBO sketch comedy show Mr. Show With Bob and David—was in the audience. This would eventually lead to Aukerman and Porter being hired as writers and occasional performers on the Odenkirk/David Cross sketch comedy series. “He sort of mentored me,” Aukerman says of Odenkirk.

Aukerman remembers those years on Mr. Show as hectic. “When you’re doing sketch comedy, it’s a lot like the show business that you dream about when you’re young,” he says, noting how there are people constantly wearing costumes. Remembering one specific moment, he says: “There was a mule, and five people dressed like Hitler, and one guy dressed like a Buddhist monk.”

When Aukerman was first hired, he figured he would be the quiet guy, but soon found his voice. “I became sort of a loudmouth,” he says. “They’re not only paying for your voice and your writing, they’re paying for your ideas and opinions.”

And now that Odenkirk and Cross are reuniting for a new sketch comedy series on Netflix, the old Mr. Show crew got back together for one more ride, though Aukerman isn’t sure that it is totally a good thing.

“I had forgotten how stressful it is to be in that situation,” he says with a laugh. “I started having bad dreams about work.”

Click HERE to view pdf.