Roundtable Discussion with AMC, FX, HBO & Showtime Executives

When the nominations for the 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards were announced July 14, the panelists for The Hollywood Reporter's inaugural TV Executive Roundtable had reason to pop champagne: Together, the invited execs scored a whopping 211 noms. It was a coincidence that the five whose schedules allowed them to participate a few weeks earlier included four cable programmers -- Charlie Collier (AMC), John Landgraf (FX), Sue Naegle (HBO) and David Nevins (Showtime) -- but that led to spirited debate about the medium's rivalries, the Netflix threat and how to handle unruly showrunners. As the only pure "seller" on the panel, Dana Walden (20th Century Fox Television) summed up the quintet nicely: "For people who are so darn competitive, it's a remarkably friendly group."

Is there a specific show you haven't done that you'd really like to make?
CHARLIE COLLIER: Before I got here, AMC did Broken Trail, a Western with Robert Duvall, and since then we've been looking for a Western series -- and we've seen a lot. Finally we have one, Hell on Wheels, coming in November.
SUE NAEGLE: I probably shouldn't have seen it, but I got a chance to. It's really good!
COLLIER: Why, thank you.
DAVID NEVINS: There are certain tones of comedy that are not out there that I think are big opportunities for us. There's a wide-open area of adult, R-rated comedy that feels sophisticated but is really raucous. That's doing well in the movies right now, and I think it is being underdone on television. I have ambitions in that direction.
JOHN LANDGRAF: Well, ironically, that's how I would sort of define our comedy brand, so I think David and I will be mining the same gold mine for the next couple years. I'm not so much genre-focused as just trying to find something different. One of the biggest challenges all of us face is the sheer volume of scripted original programming between broadcast and premium and basic cable. To find anything that's not already on television -- even mostly not on television -- is extremely difficult.
COLLIER: Wilfred [the FX comedy about a man who sees his neighbor's dog as a person] is just that. It's so smart and so good and really different. I think that's the challenge: How do you find something that doesn't look like anything else that's out there? And then, when you do it, how do you make sure you just don't try to make something else that's repetitive of your success?
DANA WALDEN: It needs to have a new twist. That's what we spend a lot of time talking about as we go into the development season, which we are about to go into again, which feels like Groundhog Day! (Laughter.)
NAEGLE: I don't miss that train.
WALDEN: It's trying to find something that you're not developing "out of the box," just to be out of the box. Modern Family is a great traditional comedy. There are many elements about it that feel fresh and original, but it's not reinventing the wheel -- it's just executing a comedy in an incredibly special way. Glee is a bigger swing, but again, it's telling high school stories, coming-of-age stories, just with this incredible twist. [Warner Bros. TV president] Peter Roth used to say, "A great series is a conventional idea with a completely updated twist." I think that is right.

Source: Full interview @ The Hollywood Reporter