PASADENA, Calif. — There were a record 599 adult scripted shows in 2022, up 7% from 2021, according to a closely watched annual tally conducted by cable network FX.

John Landgraf, chairman of FX Content and FX Productions, and the godfather of the so-called “Peak TV Theory,” said the number would likely go down in 2023, but he acknowledged he’d made that prediction before, only to see the number of scripted series climb.

“I think that 599 is the peak,” Landgraf said during FX’s Television Critics Association press tour session Thursday. “I don’t think you’ll see that number again. I think it’s going to start to come down.”

Landgraf has plenty of data this time to back up his prediction. For example, U.K. research company Ampere Analysis recently said that U.S. scripted series orders were down 24% in the back half of 2022, with major suppliers including Warner Bros. Discovery cutting way back on spending.

The FX session began with a trailer from upcoming drama Shogun.

Landgraf called 2022 “a very good year creatively” for the network. Among the FX research he shared was a chart showing Disney and its brands, including FX, with 533 votes for the TV critics’ best shows in 2022, ahead of Warner Bros. Discovery at 494 (that includes HBO), Apple TV Plus at 188 and Netflix at 187.

Among networks, HBO had 485 critics’ picks, FX 269, Apple TV had 188 and Netflix had 187.

“The competition is beginning to narrow,” Landgraf noted, speaking of the challenge not only of producing 599 original shows, but marketing them as well.

FX also broke it down by show. Apple TV Plus’s Severance tallied 81 critics’ votes for best show; FX/Hulu’s The Bear and Disney Plus’s Andor had 76, and AMC’s Better Call Saul had 65.

Besides The Bear, buzzy FX shows include Atlanta, Fleishman Is in Trouble and What We Do in the Shadows.

Landgraf spoke of Hulu as vital to FX’s distribution. He referred to the streamer as “an everything brand, a supermarket brand” and one far broader than FX. “Our brand is the human condition writ large,” he said, with shows differing in their aesthetics and tone. “I believe so strongly that individual titles have always been the bulwark of our business.”

Basic cable, he said, “is really struggling to compete,” with FX and AMC “really holding the fort.”

All content creators and distributors are challenged with getting viewers’ attention for a few hours each week. “How do you get people to pause and have a really special experience” amid social media, video games and other entertainment and attention options, Landgraf wondered. “That’s a challenge Hollywood is having right now.”

He said FX is focused on producing shows that “make them worth stopping to watch” and “having something different from what TikTok provides, what YouTube provides.”

Asked about upcoming projects, Landgraf said no topic has been finalized for the next installment of American Crime Story, and Noah Hawley’s Alien series has scripts and is in pre-production, with production beginning this year, when Hawley completes the new season of Fargo.

Asked about weekly distribution versus all-at-once, both of which apply to various FX-produced shows, Landgraf said he prefers the weekly approach, but bingeing works well for some series, such as The Bear.

“I’m trying to learn the possibilities of the new medium,” he said. “I’d like to hold onto appointment viewing and weekly viewing as much as we can.” ■

The steady, decade-long annual spending increases on original shows by the major streaming companies around the world is coming to an end. 

According to London's Ampere Analysis, spending on original programming will increase by only 2% in 2023 vs. the 6% year-over-year spike to $238 billion in 2022. 

Spending growth has been driven by the still-emerging subscription streaming sector, which collectively spent $26 billon on content in 2022. But as these platforms moderate ambitious loss-leader strategies emphasizing quick subscriber/scale expansion, their spending will plateau, too. 

Notably, Netflix -- which accounts for a quarter of all SVOD content spending -- said last year that it would plateau a content budget that reached $17 billion in 2022.

“SVOD services will still see an increase in total content investment in 2023, but a lesser 8% year-on-year growth compared to 25% in 2022," said Hannah Walsh, research manager at Ampere Analysis. "Services will continue to focus on original content to compete in a crowded, cost-sensitive market, but we are already seeing a shift in content commissioning to incorporate a greater volume of cheaper unscripted formats.” 

The 'Tipping Point'

Beyond Netflix, all of the major U.S. subscription streaming services continue to experience heavy losses. Morgan Stanley predicts 2023 will be a "tipping point year" for at least some of them, during which spending will reach unsustainable levels.

“Streamers are raising prices and cutting costs,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to clients. “If these moves do not deliver meaningful streaming profits, we see two options (not mutually exclusive): give up and/or consolidate.”

The pain, of course, is being felt even more acutely among linear program suppliers and distributors.

Broadcasters, for example, will collectively see a 3% cutback in original content spending in 2023, Ampere noted.

Two weeks ago, Ampere said that scripted series orders among U.S. programming suppliers were down 24% in the back half of 2022.

The long-awaited end to the TV business' endless expansion of shows, otherwise known as "Peak TV," finally appears at hand. 

According to Ampere Analysis, scripted series orders for shows aimed at U.S. audiences are down year over year in the second half of 2022 -- a stark reversal from their continued record pace in the first six months of the year. 

Orders are off around 40% when compared to the last half of 2019.

The research company projects that the U.S. video business will end 2022 with just 467 scripted series orders, which was one short of the 468 ordered in 2020, a time when production studios were largely shut down amid the pandemic. 

In 2021, 488 scripted series were ordered. The total was 551 in 2019. 

"The second half of the year has really gone off a bit of a cliff," said Fred Black, a research manager at Ampere, told The New York Times.

Also read: Why ‘Peak TV’ Was a Flawed Theory (and John Landgraf Didn’t Invent It)

Industry watchers, led by FX President John Landgraf, have been saying since around 2015 that there are simply too many scripted shows relative to available subscription and ad dollars. 

Operators of subscription streaming services, however, have kept the needle pegged, sacrificing economics for growth of scale. But with Disney incurring an EBITDA loss of $1.38 billion on direct-to-consumer services in Q3, a new austerity seems to be at hand. 

Noted producer Robert Greenblatt, the former chairman of NBC Entertainment and WarnerMedia, told the Times: “It’s part cost-cutting and stock price chaos, and part correction for the buying frenzy over the past five years where series were literally ordered over the phone without any proof of concept.”

Broadcasters had already begun cutting back in the first half of 2022, as did HBO Max, which trimmed new series orders from 44 in the first six months of 2021 to just 28. But with Disney and Amazon increasing scripted series commissions by 28% and 33% respectively, the U.S. television market continued to expand, Ampere said. ■

FX chairman John Landgraf said that the number of scripted series will finally peak in 2022, several years after first predicting the end of “peak TV.”

Landgraf, speaking Tuesday at FX's Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour executive session, said that 2022 is trending to feature the most scripted series ever across cable, broadcast and streaming services. Currently, 357 scripted series have already debuted across the platforms through June, up 16% from the same period last year. In 2021 the industry set a record with 559 original scripted series.

“This year we’ve seen a tidal wave of scripted programming thanks to the bottleneck of COVID that delayed production finally clearing up,” Landgraf said. 

FX and sister streaming service Hulu have contributed to the record number of new shows slated for 2022 with the debuts of such series as The Old Man, The Bear and Under the Banner of Heaven, as well as upcoming series including animated series Little Demon, The Patient and Fleishman Is in Trouble. 

After previously predicting that scripted shows would peak in 2018-19, Landgraf said that the number of scripted series will begin to decline after 2022 as the number of new streaming services begins to taper off. 

“All the major streaming services have now launched … I don’t see any new major purveyors of programming entering the scene as they have been over the past decade or more,” he said. “It will take a year and a half to find out if I’m right this time or I’ll have to eat crow yet again.” ■

The number of scripted original series for adults rose 13% in 2021 to a new peak of 559, according to research done by The Walt Disney Co.’s FX Networks unit.

The total includes shows on broadcast, cable and streaming services.

The previous peak was 532 series in 2019. The total dropped to 493 in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic hampered production of TV and movies.

Also read: Why ‘Peak TV’ Was a Flawed Theory (and John Landgraf Didn’t Invent It)

The number of series began to climb as more and more cable networks jumped into the original business as a way to differentiate their brands and extract larger fees from cable operators. 

Once streaming services started creating original programming, it began to seem like there were just too many shows for anyone to watch them all. 

As one of the first cable networks to create original series, starting with The Shield in 2002 FX has been tracking the number of series.

FX chairman John Landgraf is often credited with popularizing the idea of peak TV–the notion that at some point the number of original scripted shows would peak. ■

On Friday, FX Networks published a report suggesting the number of scripted original shows on broadcast, basic cable, premium cable and streaming dipped 7% to 493 from their peak of 532 in 2019.

The phenomena of “peak TV,” as it was famously termed by FX’s president John Landgraf five years ago at a Television Critics Association event, finally peaked. 

But the theory was flawed—the number of original shows didn’t expand beyond the consumer demand needed to support it. And Landgraf didn’t actually coin the term. I did. Well, sort of. 

Also read: Number of Scripted TV Series Dipped 7% in 2020, FX Says

Let me start with the first part. In 2014, as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video first began ramping up their original series slates, FX Networks started publishing what soon grew to be a series of annual research reports, showing the expansion of scripted original shows across the various old and new platforms. 

In 2002, the same year FX debuted its first original, gritty bad-cop drama The Shield, there were only 34 original scripted dramas and comedies on broadcast and cable. And there was definitely no SVOD or AVOD. 

A decade later, that number of scripted originals had swelled to 125. And Netflix was just about to get started with seminal hits House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. 

The number kept expanding from there. 

At the summer 2015 TCA Critics Tour in Pasadena, Calif., as the number of scripted shows swelled to 370, Landgraf made his famous declaration, noting, “My sense is that 2015 or 2016 will represent peak TV in America and that we’ll begin to see decline coming the year after that and beyond.”

Of course, Landgraf wasn’t right—led by Netflix, which would annually add billions of dollars to its content budget, the number of TV shows kept right on growing, expanding to the record 532 in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019.

In 2020, viewers worldwide consumed more television than ever amid quarantine, and the number of original shows might have taken its biggest quantum leap yet if not for COVID-impacted circumstance. Big new streaming services including Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, Quibi, HBO Max and Peacock had commissioned ambitious original series slates for their launch campaigns, But they weren’t able to come through on those plans because COVID locked down their production studios. 

So Landgraf’s Peak TV Theory was ultimately proven wrong. 

And for what it’s worth, I’m suggesting peak TV might not have been Landgraf’s theory in the first place. 

In July 2014, I wrote a feature story for the Academy of TV Arts & Sciences magazine, Emmy, titled “Much Madness.” (This story doesn’t seem to be available on the open, searchable internet—I looked everywhere for it. But here’s a screen grab of the first page in print.)

Having read the term “peak TV” in an article written by Recode’s Peter Kafka—he was using it for a different but related concept, and I also can’t find that story—I led my Emmy piece discussing research conducted in the 1950s by Shell Oil geoscientist M. King Hubbert. In his famous “Hubbert Peak” theory, he predicted the amount of the gooey stuff extracted from U.S. oil fields would reach its peak in the mid-1960s. 

Using FX’s research on original shows as a foundation, I postulated that “the explosion in online video content” was “atomizing a TV programming landscape that was merely fragmented by the emergence of original programming on cable networks a decade ago. 

“Hubbert’s peak theory is being applied to television,” I wrote. “Industry watchers are wondering, are there enough viewers to support so many shows and so many channels? Is there enough advertising? Subscription money?

“Have we reached peak TV?” I continued. 

Of course, we had not. Not even close. 

I have not spoken to John Landgraf since writing the article. And to be fair, he never has had the chance to respond to my little sour grapes IP complaint over who invented the term “peak TV.” Perhaps we both developed the same simile on our own? Who knows? I don't own any patents on this idea. And I certainly can't prove it's mine. Maybe's it's Kafka's. Maybe it belong to all of us?

Given how badly the idea has held up, who cares. Landgraf can keep it.

The number of scripted shows on broadcast, basic cable, premium cable and streaming dipped 7% to 493 from their peak of 532 in 2019, according to research from The Walt Disney Co.’s FX Networks.

 Also Read: All This TV: Too Much of a Good Thing? 

The drop, likely caused by shows not being produced or canceled because of COVID-19, came despite the introduction of new streaming services like Peacock and HBO Max that showcase their original series.

Also Read: COVID Cancellations Axe Promising Shows

Despite the decline in the number of new series, time spent watching television and time spent streaming in particular soared as people sheltered in place to avoid catching the Coronavirus and slow its spread.

FX, known for its original content, has been keeping track of the number of scripted shows and its head, John Landgraf, famously called the phenomenon of more networks making more shows “peak TV.”

Also Read: TCA17: FX's Landgraf: Television Heading to ‘Unmanageable Number of Shows’

There were an estimated 210 scripted shows on television in 2009 and the number has grown steadily until it topped the 500 mark in 2019.

Back in 2015, FX Networks and FX Productions CEO John Landgraf predicted we had reached the saturation point of “Peak TV,” which is the term he coined to describe the rising glut of original regularly scheduled scripted product across all platforms.

“My sense is that this year or 2016 will represent peak TV in America and that we’ll begin to see declines coming the year after that and beyond,” he said at the FX executive session at the 2015 Television Critics Association (TCA) Summer Press Tour. “For programmers, this bubble has created a huge challenge in finding compelling original stories and the level of talent needed to sustain those stories. It has also had an enormous impact on everyone’s ability to cut through the clutter and create real buzz.”

“What we are starting to see is a new frontier that will be defined by brands,” he added. “And while those brands may have different identities or missions, programmers without a defining brand, identity, and the scale to support that brand with great and plentiful programming and marketing, are going to have a huge struggle as time goes on.”

The “Peak TV” Bubble Is Still Inflating

To John Landgraf’s surprise (and certainly our business in general) “Peak TV” shows no signs of diminishing anytime soon. Midway through 2019 (and not including recent digital streamers Apple TV+, which has already confirmed second seasons of five of its scripted dramas, and Disney+), the tally (excluding anything non-scripted) was a mammoth 322 scripted TV shows through June. 

With an historical high 495 original scripted series reported by FX research in 2018, that means this year will reach another zenith, no doubt. And the rash of new series announced by aforementioned Apple TV+ and Disney+, not to mention an upcoming newbie streamer like HBO Max, means the challenge for any series to stand out has become more difficult than ever before. 

HBO Max, which is slated to launch in May 2020, has already announced a slew of new scripted series to add to further fuel the “Peak TV” totals. They include The Flight Attendant (created by, and starring, former The Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco); Made for Love, the dark tale of divorce and revenge; sci-fi themed Raised By Wolves from Ridley Scott; Tokyo Vice, based on the 2009 memoir by Jake Adelstein and directed by Michael Mann; and the reboot of teen-themed Gossip Girl. 

Digital Streaming Is Now the No. 1 Outlet for Original Scripted Product

Of those 495-original series in 2018, 160 shows (representing 32 percent of the total) were online, which is now the largest platform for original content. Next was broadcast at 146 series, followed by 144 for basic cable, and 42 for pay cable. Keep in mind, this does not include movies, specials, daytime dramas, and any non-scripted programming.

That said, the challenge for any series, on any platform, is finding those elusive eyeballs. And the question to ponder, once again, is just when (if ever) “Peak TV” will…well…peak.

“While the content totals could certainly rise again in 2020, and probably will, we are reaching a saturation of streamers at this point now that Apple TV+ and Disney+ are here, and HBO Max is on the horizon,” said Rob Russo, president of RNR Media Consulting. “This reminds me of the rapid rise of cable outlets, which at the time generated its own original scripted programming. And now we have all these OTT opportunities, which have expanded the individual options to record levels. But after these Big 3 additional streamers, we are probably done, at least from a large scale perspective.”

“After that, anyone trying to get into the OTT business is going to have a difficult time,” he added.

Russo predicts well-branded names like Apple and Disney may not ultimately find the success they might have had as digital streamers based on their names alone in this increasingly crowded field. But the key, said John Landgraf at that TCA session, does indeed fall within the branding.

“As technology evolves and people consume television through different modes of delivery than channels, brands will become increasingly important as mediating filters for the overwhelmed viewing public,” he said. “Brands make consumers’ lives easier. They are signposts that point to their favorite choices.”

“With so many choices, the challenge at present is indeed finding those brands, and shows, that stand out,” said Russo. “At some point, the pendulum will eventually shift to fewer of both, perhaps. But the falloff is not on the immediate horizon.”

Sometimes nice guys finish first.

FX Networks and FX Productions CEO John Landgraf is the son of a preacher with the persona of a professor, and he is a rarity in the TV industry: the closest thing to a regular amount of ego inside of a Hollywood TV executive. And humble at times though he is, these days he’s got reason to crow — loudly. Last year, his flagship channel, FX, swept the Emmy Awards with 18 wins — second only to HBO — won an industry-high four Golden Globe awards and notched the top three shows on television’s collective Best 2016 Series list — Atlanta, The People v. O.J Simpson: American Crime Story and The Americans.

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Landgraf, who took the reins at FX 14 years ago, has built a television empire in what’s arguably been the industry’s most challenging and content-rich period. FX has thrived on his watch, generating hit after hit, from veterans such as The Americans and The Strain — both set to soon end their runs — to recent breakouts such as Donald Glover’s Atlanta and the Marvel Comics-inspired Legion. The series surge continues this summer with the John Singleton-produced Snowfall, chronicling the early days of the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic.

The 55-year-old veteran proiducer also revitalized the once-dormant anthology/limited series genre with successful shows like the Emmy Award-winning American Horror Story, Fargo and American Crime Story. And he’s struck comedy gold with freshman Emmy winner Baskets, as well as venerable series such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer and You’re the Worst. Launched on FX, those shows now find their audience on comedy-centric sister channel FXX.

Related: HBO, FX Lead 2017 TCA Awards Nominations

All of Landgraf’s programming accolades have been achieved with a budget that’s a relative pittance compared with what deep-pocketed competitors like Netflix and Amazon spend on their scripted series.

With the Landgraf-coined “Peak TV” bubble of scripted series — now at more than 450 shows across broadcast, cable and digital streaming services — predicted to burst sometime over the next couple of years, Landgraf is playing the long game. His next move is repositioning linear channel FX into a multiplatform brand that can serve consumers’ changing viewing habits via digital video-on-demand service FX Now. Landgraf is also taking changing audience demographics into account — women and people of color comprise more than half of FX’s showrunners and producers.

In a conversation with Multichannel News editorial director Mark Robichaux and programming editor R.Thomas Umstead, Landgraf explained his Moneyball approach to production, the new dynamics of the TV business and how diversity drove FX to profit.

MCN: How would you rate the general health of the programming business today? Some people say this is just the downside of the cycle. Other people say it’s the edge of a cliff. You have famously called it a content bubble. What’s going on?
John Landgraf: The way I think about it is, there is a business model in television that has been successful for a long, long time, right? Sixty years, more. It’s called the channel. And it’s been an important organizing principle; it started with broadcast networks and then premium and basic cable networks, all built on the notion of a linear stream.

And these channels are still overwhelmingly how people who watch television consume their time. I think the reason that fact is often lost … I think if we dug into the data we’d find that still more than 80% of all time consuming television is on linear channels.

I think the amount of time spent watching linear television channels each year relative to the prior year and the percentage of the total consumption of television each year relative to the prior year is going down — very slowly going down.

And on the other side of the spectrum, there is an appreciating television asset, which we’d call, broadly speaking, nonlinear consumption, right? And I’m including in that VOD and TV Everywhere and FX Now and HBO Go and DVRs, as well as Hulu and Netflix and YouTube.

So it’s a vast bundle of nonlinear consumption. Mostly on-demand. Its main characteristic is it’s not that flowing linear stream.

Buzzfeed’s watermelon video thing was ludicrous because it’s not compelling to watch people put rubber bands around a watermelon relative to watching Silicon Valley or The Americans or the Super Bowl. It’s a tiny, tiny thing in terms of actual, concurrent streams or in hours of consumption relative to broadcast television.

Content on these powerful linear streams is still watched vastly, vastly more, in terms of current viewership, than anywhere else. … They are still far and away the best place to start advertising, better than a bunch of tiny little bits of consumption in a system rife with fraud and bots and all kinds of things. Not to say there’s no value there, but just saying the level of value is vastly different.

MCN: Do you think traditional programmers are adapting fast enough?
JL: It’s an evolutionary process. I think one of the reasons that we actually began counting the number of original programs, which led to identifying this phenomenon called “peak TV” is ultimately you’ve got to accept the background radiation of the competition, right? You can’t put your head in the sand and think that major-league pitching hasn’t improved in 30 years and think that you’re going to pitch the same way you did 30 years ago with the same result. You have to basically tool yourself to the batters you’re facing in the current market.

We just have to be better, because the only thing that will allow us to rise as opposed to fall in this environment is we’ve just got to get better.

MCN: How is FX adapting to the new environment?
JL: We have actually managed to be pretty flat in the last four years. We took the FX network, we layered on the FXX network and the FX movie network, FXM. We layered three networks’ worth of consumption on top of one, all under one brand, and then we also layered on a significant amount of nonlinear consumption.

Our COO [Chuck Saftler], who has been the dominant buyer of movies in basic-cable network for a decade now, bought a year of linear term for our channel. Now, for a major blockbuster, we got a significant number of months of nonlinear term. And so we accumulated a very large nonlinear bundle of movies.

We also did something first that no other channel had done. When a series airs, it immediately goes into the TV Everywhere space, into FX Now, and essentially you can consume it, you can binge it on-demand from the first episode to the end. So we have made really significant strides and we’re at the point now where we generate about 10% as many nonlinear streams as linear streams, even given the fact that we are programming 24 hours a day on three channels.

In the long run, I don’t think there is a fundamental way to counteract the fact that there is going to be modest decline. No matter how well you program a linear channel, you can’t execute your way out of structural change.

If you want your business and your brand to be stronger tomorrow than they are today, there is only one answer, which is you have to lean into the appreciating asset, where there is growth in the marketplace, and where that growth lies is in nonlinear consumption, period.

MCN: How would you judge your performance?
JL: Our point of view is that we’re proud of what we have done to date, but it’s not comprehensive enough, it’s not radical enough. But knowing that, just as we know that if we didn’t step up our programming game we were going to recede rather than grow, is a good thing. I think knowing the truth is the first key. Knowing the trends and accepting the truth of the future is the first key to being successful in anything strategic, certainly in business.

So what you’ll see from us, and I can’t speak to our competitors, is more radical and more aggressive moves in the future to transform our business into what I would call a multiplatform brand. I wrote a memo — it might have been five or six years ago — to a number of key colleagues here, basically suggesting that if FX is going to thrive as a business and a brand over time, it must transform itself from a linear channel into a multiplatform brand. [Part of that] was the formation of FX Productions in 2005, when we started owning our own shows.

It’s not as if I haven’t seen the writing on the wall here for a long time. We’re figuring it out.

MCN: Wall Street is already punishing programming stocks. What do you think the business fallout will be of this disruption and competition? Will this content bubble pop?
JL: There are two sources of capital, which rely on different capital standards, that are funding this. One is the capital that flows in through traditional media companies that are still mostly oriented around brands that develop from linear channels or their film studios, right? The metric that the market uses to buy and judge that stock is profit. It takes a multiple of profit.

Then there are these other companies; the leading ones in it are Amazon and Netflix. Netflix has said they are going to run at negative $1.8 billion dollars in free cash flow this year. So even though they will declare an EBITDA, that will be because they are pushing down the amortization of programming costs into subsequent years. Their actual revenue will be $1.8 billion lower than their expenses this year, based on their own statement.

So their metric is not profit, it’s customer acquisition, I suppose. And essentially investors are willing to extend them capital at a loss in essence on the assumption that their growth and subscribers will keep up with that trailing amortization and ultimately overtake it, and they will be able to sustain and grow profitability over time. Similarly, Amazon is a very different retail business with $130-plus billion dollars in top-line revenue, so its programming costs are kind of a rounding error. So these are really different businesses.

I think what we’re going to find when we roll up all the scripted programming made in America this year … it will be more original scripted adult series this year than last year, but then, in the aggregate, premium television channels, basic-cable channels … and broadcast-television channels will make slightly less content this year than they did last. I’m talking in the range of 5% or less from peak.

I think we are probably past the peak, in terms of the total volume created by linear television channels and their associated brands, at least at this point.

MCN: What is driving this arms race?
JL: It’s this massive amount of capital flooding into the market through Netflix and Amazon, and to some extent Hulu or YouTube Red or Apple and a few other buyers. And it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, in the sense that it’s nonprofit expenditure. It does not drive profit. It actually drives loss, right? It drives growth in top-line revenue, but it drives loss.

So we’ve got to punch above our weight, and we’ve got to fight heavyweight fighters who are a lot bigger and have a longer reach than we do just in terms of physical gifts. You’ve got to be crafty and smart and have endurance.

MCN: On that note, you’ve largely been outgunned in terms of budget by some of these new entrants, namely Netflix and Amazon. Yet you’ve been exceptionally successful at picking hits. How?
JL: So you’re a coach. What you’re trying to do is create a winning environment. And in the case of television, every single TV show is made by a single individual person, or a couple or three individual people, who then accumulate around them hundreds of other individuals. It’s a personal thing, it’s a bespoke thing — it’s not done well, I don’t think, in a factory context. It’s not as if you create the machine that builds the machine, which is the Tesla factory, and then it builds these devices of uniform size and shape. Every single thing is a piece of art and business created by an individual artist/businessperson/ craftsperson.

And there is just no such thing as a one-size-fits-all formula. … I think a good coach, for example, is good at coaching players who have different styles and different needs and different quirks and different abilities. You’ve got to get good at doing that. Then what’s hard, I think in this business, is to stay singularly focused on that single thing because there are so many other things that are distracting.

You know the political maxim, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It’s like, “It’s the shows, stupid.”

The reason we built a studio is because we wanted to do all of it. We didn’t want to license it and do part of it — the marketing, the publicity — and leave the financial and business and production issues to someone else. We wanted to have a deep and abiding 360-degree creative/personal business relationship with the people that make television from top to bottom.

I built it as a former producer. I built an organization that said, “Well, if I were gonna make a decision about bringing a talented person, what would I want from the organization I brought that person to, to give that person the best chance at success and me the best chance at success?”

I think people do their best work here — it’s pretty simple. And then once they come here, they not only have the best experience of their career, they do the best work of their career, because they have a profound level of engagement and support from me and every person in this organization.

MCN:What’s your biggest fear for the business?
JL: I’m pretty bullish. I think this is a really exciting and dynamic moment in time and I think decisions are being made now that are gonna yield tremendous success and colossal failure because I think that it’s like doing what you did won’t get you where you wanna go, right?

But on the other hand, I think there is going to be a culling of the strongest businesses and the strongest brands. I think the strongest ones are going to emerge. It’s kind of like a forest fire, right? The strongest trees in the forest have more light and more room to grow in the aftermath of the forest fire. So you just have to be on the right side of surviving a transformation like this.

MCN: You’ve got the Emmy Awards coming up very soon. FX had a great, record-setting showing last year. What’s your expectation for this year? Can you repeat what you did last year?
JL: It’s crazy to me. I mean, I feel really proud of our entrants and I think it’s as strong a team as we have ever fielded.

I think a different metric would be that more than 80% of our shows that we programmed at FX made year-end top 10 or best lists. And I think for Netflix, that was in the 15% to 20% range. If you want to call that a batting average, it’s batting more than .800, relative to batting .150 to .200.

I think you’ve got to give a little bit of an advantage, maybe more than a little bit of an advantage, to the teams with the bigger payroll, because this is the Oakland A’s playing the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees in payroll terms, you know?

MCN: What is it that has helped you pick the right shows? Gut? Test audiences?
JL: One of the things I’ve realized as I’ve matured as a person is that a collective intelligence is always greater than an individual intelligence. So one of the things we do around here is that even though the final decision is mine, I really listen to this group of people that I’ve worked with for a long time and I really benefit from their individual intelligence. We can have a very agreeable disagreement and a very robust and honest debate, and I learn things through listening to those debates.

And I never forget I’m betting on a person. Television is made by people and their character, their talent, their intellect, their intent, how dedicated they are to that intent, how much stamina they have — how strong is their ego, not only in terms of willingness to be stubborn and intractable when they need to be, but strong enough to take criticism and tough criticism, strong enough to work through failure.

I get to know these people individually, I sit in a room and talk to them, I ask them questions, I get a feel for who they are as people — I know I’m betting on them. Yes, I’m betting on their idea and yes I’m betting on a pilot story, but I am, more than anything else, I am betting on a person, or people if it’s a partnership. And I never forget that.

You can’t fake love. You either have it or you don’t. And I love this. I love this and I love the people who do it with passion and do it well. And I really try to be someone who cares about, thinks about, the players.

I certainly am a wonky guy who does everything I can to develop technique in myself or others, and I will use any piece of data and I can get very buttoned up on the numbers. I mean, I am not someone who is not analytical and doesn’t believe in analysis.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think you can get to the highest level if you’re coming from an analytical point of view. I think you have to come in with your heart. I think you have to bring your whole heart to the enterprise because I think people feel that — they feel a level of dedication, passion and caring, if it’s there, that’s different than analysis.

MCN: Continuing on that thought, you have been very public in stating that you have provided more opportunities for people of color and women behind the scenes and on camera. How important is that to the overall success of FX?
JL: What I have been trying to do here is have a brand that isn’t manufactured from the top down … it grows from the grass roots up. And I don’t think that that brand then is about a particular demographic. I don’t think it’s about a particular gender or a particular ethnicity. I think it’s about fearless points of view and fearless innovation and fearless pursuit of quality.

So it’s been really important to me that [FX’s programming] wasn’t only a white, male thing, you know? Famously, and this is a testament to the fact that you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelet, we developed Breaking Bad and I passed on it. So call that a really colossal mistake on my part, the beneficiary of which was AMC because we let it go. We had it, we owned it and then they wanted to make it, and we didn’t want to make it, so we let it go elsewhere.

But I made that decision because I didn’t want to put a fourth male anti-hero show on the air when we had three already — Nip/Tuck, The Shield and Rescue Me. We put Damages on the air instead — pretty good show, also nominated for an Emmy with Mad Men. It broke that glass ceiling, although Mad Men won and Damages didn’t. But that was a statement about the pathway we wanted to move forward, which was we wanted the best talent, not the best talent that wanted to write about white male anti-heroes — the best talent period, full stop.

The other thing I’ve said — and I mean it — is that as I’ve reflected with great gratitude on this tremendous opportunity that this career has given me, and the opportunity to run this wonderful brand and lead this team, I’ve thought about the mentors that had made that possible. A common theme in that list is white males. White, heterosexual males. And I’m a white, heterosexual male.

So how do I not recognize it as an unearned advantage that essentially I had some things that were tremendously in common with them in terms of my own gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation?

So I just said, “You know what, OK, so pay it forward.” And paying it forward for me doesn’t mean don’t hire a white man, because I do, but it means … work hard to overcome the tendency for that to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and really, really put your back into it, have your organization put its back into creating an outsized number of opportunities for women and people of color and people with different gender identities and sexual orientations. Act locally.

So we have been very, very aggressive at doing that. The last time we counted, 57% of our episodic directors [were] non-white males. And by the way, when we got called out by Variety, that was 12%. So we have gone from 88% white males to 43%. We halved that. And concurrently, we have increased the ratio of people who are non-white males directing by almost five times.

MCN: Why are you pushing back Katrina ? What’s happened with that show?
JL: After thinking about it long and hard, the [American Crime Story] creative people involved decided they wanted to focus the story in a slightly different way, and that required some rethinking of how we were going to tell it. And we already had Versace in production, and it’s going great. So in essence, we were like, “OK, well, we’ve got a little bit more time here to get Katrina exactly right.” And I’m even more excited about where we’re coming out on Katrina.

MCN: So will both appear in 2018? Katrina later in 2018 and Versace earlier?
JK: I would say that is likely, yes.

MCN: Is there anything you want to get off your chest?
JK: I think that analysts and investors and some of the people that write about our industry are counting us out, because they are looking at it as if we are and always will be linear television brands and channels, and therefore our potential as businesses only lies in how successful linear channels and brands will be in the future. And I think that’s a mistake. I think we are actually incredibly well-positioned to be profoundly successful nonlinear, multiplatform brands.

What’s on Tap This Summer
Networks set seasonal slate of studio-produced fare

The summer television season is upon us, and cable networks along with video streaming services are gearing up to launch new scripted series in programming genres ranging from comedy to horror and drama. Here’s a partial list of new original scripted series premieres from cable and digital subscription video-on-demand services from June 19 through Aug. 31.

JUNE 19
Loch Ness
Drama (Acorn TV)

JUNE 22
The Mist
Horror/drama (Spike)

JUNE 23
GLOW
Comedy (Netflix)
Free Rein
Drama (Netflix)

JUNE 25
Hotel Transylvania:
The Series
Animated (Disney Channel)

JUNE 27
Tales
Drama (BET)

JUNE 30
Gypsy
Drama (Netflix)
Little Witch Academia
Animated series (Netflix)
Danger & Eggs
Animated series (Amazon)

JULY 5
Snowfall
Drama (FX)

JULY 7
Castlevania
Animated series (Netflix)

JULY 10
Will
Drama (TNT)

JULY 11
The Bold Type
Drama (Freeform)
The Hollywood Puppet Sh!t Show
Comedy (Fuse)
American Ripper
Drama (History)

JULY 12
I’m Sorry
Comedy (TruTV)

JULY 14
Friends from College
Comedy (Netflix)

JULY 17
Loaded
Drama (AMC)

JULY 21
Raven’s Home
Comedy (Disney Channel)
Ozark
Drama (Netflix)

JULY 28
Room 104
Drama (HBO)

AUG. 2
The Sinner
Drama (USA Network)

AUG. 3
What Would Diplo Do?
Comedy (Viceland)

AUG. 9
Mr. Mercedes
Drama (Audience Network)

AUG. 13
Get Shorty
Comedy (Epix)

AUG. 18
Marvel’s The Defenders
Drama (Netflix)

AUG. 24
There’s … Johnny!
Comedy (Seeso)

AUG. 25
Disjointed
Comedy (Netflix)
The Tick
Comedy (Amazon)

On Jan. 8, actor and director Donald Glover was onstage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles accepting the best comedy series Golden Globe Award for FX’s freshman series Atlanta, for which he was a first-time executive producer.

Glover, who would also win the Globe for best actor in a comedy series, thanked the “the black folks” in Atlanta for being “amazing people.”

What’s been amazing for the television industry is the infusion of young, African- American executive producers and creators like Glover who have created popular scripted programming with diverse images and storylines that, until just a few years ago, had been rarely seen on the small screen.

Whether its Selma producer Ava DuVernay examining the complex lives of estranged Louisiana siblings in OWN’s Queen Sugar, rapper 50 Cent and Courtney Kemp Agboh exploring the double life of a club owner who’s also a drug kingpin in Starz’s drama series Power, or Internet sensation Issa Rae keeping it real about the lives of single black women in HBO’s freshman comedy series Insecure, African-American creators and producers are stepping up to the plate and delivering quality, unfiltered programming with broad appeal to a cross section of viewers.

PART OF ‘GOLDEN’ WAVE

More newbie African-American TV creators and producers are set to make their debut in 2017, as an unprecedented 500 scripted series are expected to reach TV scereens this year, according to a recent FX study. Showtime has tapped actress Lena Waithe (Netflix’s Masters of None) to helm its upcoming drama series Chi, while several high-profile movie producers will move to the small screen with scripted projects, including Spike Lee (Netflix’s She’s Gotta Have It) and John Singleton (FX’s Snowfall).

Singleton, an Oscar-nominated director for 1991’s Boyz n the Hood, said television is now providing more opportunities to develop projects targeted to diverse viewers. Singleton, who earned an Emmy Award nomination for his direction of an episdode of FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, will also produce Rebel, a police drama series for BET set to debut in March.

“With TV, it’s like you’re making a movie every week,” Singleton said.

Black History Month Viewing Guides:What to Watch | Interstitals

As the definition of what constitutes TV widens, African-American-helmed scripted series are making their mark in the current environment of high-quality programming.

“There’s been talk about the golden age of television for a while now, and because there are so many ways to get your content out there it opens the door for a lot more voices to be heard instead of when there were just three or six gatekeepers controlling everything people see,” said music superstar John Legend, an executive producer of WGN America’s sophomore drama series Underground, which chronicles the escape of antebellum-era Southern slaves via the Underground Railroad.

Legend added, “It has been great for diversity on television.”

Related > MCN Original Video: John Legend Discusses 'Underground' Season 2

Still, the question remains whether the influx of African-American showrunners and producers will be a passing trend or a key feature of television’s future. Even as African-American-produced, directed and created projects on cable networks proliferate across cable networks and streaming services, minority producers remain rare behind the camera.

Minority show creators in general represented just 7.8% of cable scripted shows during the 2013-14 season, according to the UCLA 2016 Hollywood Diversity Report. While those numbers will undoubtedly climb over the next few years as post-2014 shows like ABC’s Black-ish and Starz’s Power are factored in, Darnell Hunt, director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, said at September’s NAMIC Conference that the representation numbers will still remain below the overall U.S. minority population.

The history of the entertainment industry is littered with periods when movies and TV shows featuring African-American culture looked to have broken into the mainstream, only to nearly vanish within a few years, Insecure showrunner Prentice Penny said.

In particular, he pointed to what was initially thought of as the “Golden Age” of diversity in movies during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when films such as Menace II Society, She’s Gotta Have It and Boyz n the Hood seemed ready to open doors to more films directed and produced by African-Americans. But in the 2000s, few movies from mainstream studios were being helmed by African-American writers, directors and producers.

“The truth is I have no idea,” Penny said when asked whether the current trend of African-American produced content will be long-lasting. “There are always those moments where they make all of these projects and then, 10 years later, there’s nothing. I hope this is [sustainable] and that lots of voices can get heard.”

Certainly, the critical and audience appeal for these shows bodes well for a potentially sustained future. FX’s Atlanta, which follows the lives of cousins trying to make it big in the city’s rap scene, drew 3 million viewers in its Sept. 6 premiere, the most for an FX series in five years. That was followed by a slew of industry accolades, including a Critics’ Choice Award and two Golden Globe Awards for Glover, both as an actor and producer of the series.

Last month, FX rewarded Glover with an exclusive television production deal that includes a second season of Atlanta, set to return in 2018 after Glover finishes his work on the next Star Wars film.

“We’re going to try to get that show back as soon as we can because there’s a great audience that wants that show,” FX president Eric Schrier said during the network’s Television Critics Association tour press event last month.

HBO’s Insecure, which drew 1.1 million viewers in its Oct. 9 premiere, has also been renewed for a second season. Penny — who will produce and star in truTV’s reality series Upscale With Prentice Penny, set to debut in March — said he was initially surprised at the incredibly positive response to the show.

“There’s no formula … you have no idea what people will respond to,” he said. “I feel blessed that people responded to it. You can’t control what the viewing public decides to watch, so you just have to do the best you can.”

He also said that the expansion of distribution outlets via online streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube will continue to create opportunities for diverse images and stories to be produced.

Added Underground’s Legend: “The landscape was much different then because there are way more distribution channels now — not just cable, satellite or premium channels but so many other places, like Netflix and Hulu, where people can view content. As content creators, its gives us more latitude to populate these different channels with interesting and diverse content.

“It’s made TV more diverse than film because there are so many different opportunities for audiences to get what they’re looking for on television, which means a diverse range of viewpoints and voice can be seen and heard,” Legend added.

Beyond selected hit shows, networks are well aware that African- American viewers are an important audience. African-Americans continue to consume more video than any other group, thereby increasing the viability of content that appeals directly to those viewers. African-Americans average more than 42 hours of live TV viewing during the third quarter of 2016, according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report, well above the U.S. average of 29 hours, Hispanics (22 hours) and Asian-Americans (14 hours).

KEY TO KEEPING AUDIENCES

Also, as the overall U.S. population continues to diversify, the need for new, unique stories told from a different point of view will force linear network distributors to continue to foster the development of content created by producers and creators of color — otherwise, audiences will migrate to the web, Penny said.

“I think that in the digital space people can just make their own content and put it out there for people to connect to right away,” Penny said. “It changes how we get content to the marketplace, so it definitely opens the door for literally anybody of any color or nationality that has something to say to put it out and get a response right away.”

FX Networks president John Landgraf said 52% of FX’s show directors in 2017 will not be white men, in an effort to better reflect the diversity of the network’s audience.

“We’re going to keep going until everything about our channel and every aspect of our channel is fair and better reflects the diversity of the population of the country we live in, and is not as skewed as the whole industry has been towards white heterosexual males,” Landgraf said at the last month’s Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour.

Added Underground executive producer Misha Green: “I think the diversification of stories that are being told right now will continue because there are more outlets. I think more content is needed, and the gatekeepers who wanted to keep the gate closed are now saying we need shows. I think the increase of content has helped more diverse voices come through, but more still need to come through. I can’t wait to see and hear those voices.”

Get complete coverage of #TCA16.

Just over a year since his prediction about peak TV leveling off this year, John Landgraf, CEO of FX Networks, said the total number of scripted shows continues to rise.

Landgraf said the number of original scripted shows is around 430-450 currently, and likely to hit 500 next year.

“We could well see the growth trend carry on into the 2017-2018 calendar year,” he said. "I stick by my prediction that we'll see peak TV decline within 2-1/2 years. 2019 at the latest."

Landgraf envisions the total eventually leveling off around 400.

The exec noted FX’s strong showing in the Emmy nominations, particularly when factoring in that the network’s programming budget, he said, is a third of HBO’s and a sixth of Netflix’s.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

Beverly Hills, Calif. — FX Networks head John Landgraf attacked the overall glut of programming during his TCA executive session Friday, saying 2015-16 will represent "peak TV," with a decline in originals to follow.

The boom in original cable, broadcast and streaming shows, from about 280 five years ago to more than 400 at year-end, by FX's calculations, can be measured by the "blood pouring out of your eyeballs," he quipped. The inevitable result, he said, is ratings erosion for all but an elite handful of shows such as Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and Empire.

That opening thrust led into a 45-minute deep dive into a range of issues that networks, content creators and audiences are grappling with: not just the programming bubble, but multiplatform, on-demand, advertising and the rise of SVOD services. While he devoted a few minutes to success stories like American Horror Story, The Americans and The Strain, as well as missteps like The Comedians (which he argued got significantly better as Season 1 progressed, but kept losing audience), Landgraf used the bulk of his stage time to talk big picture. It was a welcome change during TCA from the execs who kept their appearances strictly superficial and promotional.

Landgraf repeatedly underlined the importance of network brands as filters for overwhelmed viewers. That will be the key to their ultimate survival, he argued.

"Ten years from now, the linear channels that make up FX Networks will exist. But consumption of our content off linear platforms may represent 50% of overall consumption, as opposed to 95% today," he said. Rebalancing the business in the interim is "going to be a messy, inelegant process." At the same time, he said, "Wall Street's reaction [to indications of cord-cutting's threat in recent earnings reports] is way over the top. There's nothing that Bob Iger said on his call that I didn't see coming and haven't been planning for for many years. It is a transition. It's a bumpy, rocky transition but it's not a bumpy transition that yields a valueless future for major media companies."

Related: All This TV: Too Much of a Good Thing?

Already during the two-decade run of FX, there have been dramatic changes. "When I started, 55% of our revenue was from advertising," Landgraf said. "This year it's about 32% and we're projecting it to decline in the next two years to 30%. But about 12% is content ownership and that didn't used to exist at all."

One pressure point is owning content in post-linear windows.

"I would prefer not to have sold any of our content to Netflix," he said, "But when you're in a business that can successfully monetize somebody's content and you have another business that can't, it's difficult to refuse that money." The gap between what SVOD services are able to pay and how much content owners can reap by distributing it themselves (via ad revenue in VOD or other means) simply has to narrow, Landgraf insisted.

Traditional players do have baggage, he conceded. But the bundle in some form is an economic and consumer-behavior imperative. "A channel is an artifact of a linear ecosystem," he said. "What we have to figure out is a new bundle of programming because I don't believe there's any future where programming is produced and distributed on an a la carte basis. You have to have a portfolio of programming in order for people to invest and to market and in order to take risks."

Asked about the parade of actors and showrunners who have gushed throughout TCA about the bliss of working on a streaming show, Landgraf said, "Frankly, when you pay people, they tend to want to get up onstage and say nice things." He also recounted his experience of signing Louis C.K. to do the first season of his show. By initial arrangement, neither Landgraf nor anyone on his team gave notes or interfered with the making of the show after $4 million had been wired to the comedian to start production. Over time, absent any communication at all with FX brass, C.K. came to see the merit of discussing episodes with the network. "He ended up wanting my input and wanting to know what worked and didn't work." Eventually, the two would have a lengthy conversation every time an episode edit would arrive.

In terms of that rapport with creatives, he added, "With all due respect to Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, their models are patterned after our model."