As the daughter of immigrants, Mina Lefevre was expected to follow a very narrow career path: doctor, lawyer or engineer. Lefevre was duly obedient, double-majoring in economics and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley and studying for the MCATs when she suddenly took a sharp and lasting swerve.

“I remember having this moment thinking I really want to pursue my dream,” said Lefevre, head of development and programming at Meta, where she oversees the development and production of original series for Facebook’s video platform and spearheads funded original content that lives across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.

That dream, spurred by the film theory courses she’d loved in college, involved pursuing entertainment in some form. “That was literally the last thing my parents wanted me to do,” Lefevre said of venturing into the wildly unstable fields of independent feature films in San Francisco, and then temp jobs in television in Los Angeles. “My parents were mortified.”

Rising Through TV Ranks

Eventually, she found steady work, climbing the ladder at places like ABC Family (where she became VP, development and programming, helping launch the channel while developing shows like Pretty Little Liars) and then MTV (where she was head of scripted, doubling the number of such projects with shows like Faking It, Scream and Finding Carter).

Her Iran-born parents were mollified, though, when she first held a job title of director. “My mom kept telling everyone I was a director,” Lefevre said. “It’s very hard to describe what an executive actually does.”

Lefevre said all that studying in college did pay off, as her economics courses gave her a deeper understanding of budgeting. “I probably stick my head too much into budgets for my head of production,” she said with a laugh.

While she has shifted from linear to streaming and has largely moved away from scripted, Lefevre said her past stops also provided the necessary skill sets. “Content and creative are really at the core of what I do,” she said. “What’s changing is the way you’re telling the story and giving it to the consumer. It’s exciting to work at a place able to figure out new ways to communicate that and work with talent to reach their fan base even more directly.”

Since guiding Facebook Watch to its debut back in 2017, Lefevre has steered to screens of various sizes programming like the Daytime Emmy Award-nominated series Red Table Talk with Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Adrienne Banfield-Norris and a spinoff with Gloria Estefan and her family. The lineup cuts across genres to include talk shows, reality, sports and docuseries. High-profile talent has come on board, such as Steve Harvey (STEVE), Taraji P. Henson (Piece of Mind with Taraji), Courteney Cox (9 Months with Courteney Cox) and Stephen Curry (Stephen vs. The Game). She has also developed youth-oriented programming for Messenger’s Watch Together with the likes of Cardi B and Post Malone. 

Ricky Van Veen, head of global creative strategy for media partnerships at Meta, said Lefevre has made the shift seamlessly. “Mina’s ability to adapt her strong creative instincts from linear to digital and now even the metaverse is truly impressive,” he noted, adding, “She’s beloved by internal colleagues and industry peers alike for her honest yet warm ‘get things done’ attitude.”

Lefevre said adapting comes with the territory and not just because traditional notions like half-hour and hour formats fall away at Meta. When the company started Facebook Watch, the challenge was to explain what it was trying to do in creating programming that would have a uniquely intimate relationship with an audience and build a community, a social-media water-cooler conversation. 

Then, of course, the field got more crowded. “It’s incredibly competitive out there now,” she said. “The piece of the pie is getting smaller.”

Setting a New Path at Meta

Still, Lefevre is confident the company has found a “unique” new path that they’ll be pushing: “A big point of difference for us is that we’re looking toward a One Meta approach — to find content for all the surfaces, from Facebook to Instagram to Messenger to the richer and more immersive experiences in VR and AR, so the audience can have whatever experience they want.”

The new approach is a win-win-win, she said, benefiting not just audiences and Meta but also the talent who will achieve much broader distribution. 

“We’ll be serving so many surfaces and finding the best ways for consumers to watch content and form a community around it,” she said. “That, to me, is exciting.” ■

Can you make an old hit new again?

Several cable networks and OTT providers are hoping to appeal to the mature end of the millennial demographic — that is 25-to-34-year-olds — by rebooting or remaking classic 1980s and 1990s TV shows.

Cartoon Network has reanimated The Powerpuff Girls, returning the characters to its schedule with a new series some 11 years after the original ended. Netflix’s Fuller House updated the 1990s ABC sitcom Full House, with the Tanner kids now grown up and raising children themselves. MTV has reimagined Scream, the 1990s horror-movie franchise that put Courteney Cox of Friends on the big screen in its first iteration.

And Disney Channel is remixing a rendition of Girl Meets World — featuring the now-grown kid stars of 1990s sitcom Boy Meets World.

All of these shows aim to appeal to busy millennials who are increasingly viewing content on nontraditional television platforms.

Today’s millennial viewers are often defined as cable cord-cutting, binge-watching viewers who devour the latest eclectic short-form content via digital platforms. Older members of the massive 16-to-34-year-old demo, though, still watch a lot of their TV the way baby boomers and Generation Xers do, gravitating to the long-form, classic content they grew up with back when cable was still cool.

ONE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL

The trend reflects a realization that all millennials are not the same, and not every YouTube video or short-form show will appeal to all consumers in the demo.

“All of these networks are looking at the millennial audience, and some are recognizing that [older millennials] really like reminiscing about their childhood,” David Quinn, senior brand lead for digital marketing firm Beamly, said. “It was a wonderful time and some millennials embrace that.”

Like boomers and Gen Xers, older millennials are finding that the responsibilities that come with work and family leave less time for entertainment. And, like those older demos, they’re often drawn to familiar content that resonates.

Nostalgia can be a big driver for remakes of movie and TV hits that have built-in audiences but may be sitting unused in the crowded soup of subscription VOD platforms. The challenge, of course, is to parlay that nostalgia and bring in the old crowd, as well as new viewers, without it all seeming tacky.

It’s a tricky challenge for TV’s demographic marketers, who parse the world in groups of boomers, Gen Xers and millennials.

And older millennials, particularly those with families, also watch more traditional television than their younger demographic cohorts. Millennials starting a family watch more than three hours a day of live TV — that’s over an hour more than single millenials consume, according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report for fourth-quarter 2015.

That boosts the value of franchises that date back to older millennials’ childhoods, such as Cartoon Network’s The Powerpuff Girls and Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold!. Nick has set a Hey Arnold! special that picks up where the final episode of the animated series in 2002 left off .

Nickelodeon Franchise Properties senior vice president of content development Chris Viscardi said that franchises like Hey Arnold! and 1990s game show Legends of the Hidden Temple — which the network is turning into a live-action TV movie — give Nickelodeon a leg up on other entertainment networks trying to reach the elusive audience group.

Millennials with families are also more likely than not to introduce their kids to their childhood TV favorites, Viscardi said. That helps Nick reach out to a new generation of viewers.

“There is a huge millennial love for those series, so we know that millennial fans who grew up on them will come back,” Viscardi said. “There are some things inherent in our properties that we know a new generation of fans would love also.”

Nick is exploring several other older titles that it might resurrect and develop new episodes for, although Viscardi would not provide specific details.

Shows such as Girl Meets World — less a reboot than a 2014 spinoff of the 1993-2000 ABC series Boy Meets World, featuring grownup characters from the first series with children of their own — allows Disney Channel to reach a wide audience of both adults and kids, Sean Coccia, executive vice president of business operations and general manager for Disney Channels Worldwide, said.

To further encourage co-viewing, Disney will resurrect DuckTales, a 1987-1990 syndicated animated series built around Donald Duck’s nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie and his Uncle Scrooge, for its Disney XD network in 2017. And Disney Channel later this will year premiere Adventures in Babysitting, an original movie based loosely on the 1987 theatrical fi lm of the same name.

FAMILY AFFAIR

“For Disney Channel, it is not hard to reach these millennials if we deliver content that provides them with the opportunity to share an experience and time with their families,” Cocchia said. “Social media has also helped us by giving these millennial families platforms to talk about what they love and what they are seeing in the new storylines and characters.”

Classic entertainment franchises don’t always initially appeal to the older end of the millennial audience. MTV’s Scream series — based on the horror movie franchise of the same name launched 20 years ago — had its biggest audience among younger 16-to-24-year-olds during its freshman season last summer, according to MTV senior vice president of scripted programming Mina Lefevre.

Scream will return for its sophomore season in May.

“[Younger millennials] knew about Scream — some of them watched it and some of them didn’t — but they all knew about the value and iconic nature of Scream,” Lefevre said. “For us to reinvent it for them is where we stood. We thought we could make it as appealing and iconic to them as it was to [older millennials].”

Cartoon Network’s Miller said that networks looking to reach the full swath of millennials will ultimately have to market and promote differently to the younger and older segments of the demo. “There is absolutely a difference in how we create content for different audience segments because they all consume content differently,” Miller said. “We’ve devoted a lot of time and resources to really understanding all of our audiences and how they consume media — including millennials of all different life stages, not just ages — and we develop our strategies accordingly.”

For the older end of millennials, Beamly’s Quinn said the trend toward revitalizing 1990s classic programming is only beginning as distributors look for ways to reach an elusive audience that is looking for some familiarity to go alongside all the new content offered to them.

“I definitely think this is a trend that we’ll see continue going forward,” he said. “I think it makes perfect sense because if a network is looking to create entertainment in a crowded marketplace it’s nice to create entertainment that has a built-in audience.”