As he approaches the fourth anniversary of his appointment as President of Entertainment for Showtime, Robert Greenblatt is preparing his most aggressive schedule yet. August will see the premiere of the network's new adult comedy drama Californication starring David Duchovny. It will be paired on Monday nights with the hit comedy Weeds, which will return for its third season. In October the serial killer sensation Dexter and the dark drama Brotherhood will begin their sophomore seasons as a must-see double bill on Sunday nights. Next year will see the return of the period drama The Tudors, with legendary actor Peter O'Toole joining the cast, and the return of Tracey Ullman to television as the star of a new Showtime comedy series, Tracey Ullman's State of the Union.
Greenblatt recently spoke with MediaVillage editor Ed Martin about his roster of acclaimed shows and the success he has had at attracting big name talent to "a relatively small network." An edited transcript of that interview follows.
Ed Martin: Your mandate at Showtime from the start has been to create bold and distinctive programming that would call attention to the network. What were your biggest challenges coming in and are you facing the same challenges today?
Robert Greenblatt: The same challenges exist and will probably always exist. They're mostly about the sheer volume of original programming that's coming from every direction. Every cable network now is doing original programming. We're competing for an incredibly fragmented audience. It's difficult to get them to find new things much less commit to them. Another challenge is that Showtime is a relatively small network. We're in a fraction of the homes that 95 percent of the other networks are in, so it's harder for us to reach the masses and get the word out there that we have great programming. That's why it's critical that the shows do much of the heavy lifting themselves, just the idea of the shows and people we cast in them. We've got to be screaming out loud right from the get go to break through the clutter. We're trying to reach millions of people who don't subscribe yet.
The other challenge that I faced at the beginning that I'm happy to say we have overcome is trying to get the best talent in the door at the network. When I came in four years ago it wasn't the place that people were gravitating toward. Showtime was predominantly an original movie network with a few series and those series hadn't really broken out so we had to quickly make the network into a place that the great series people wanted to be, not just the movie people. Early on I don't think anybody was excited about being at Showtime because we hadn't had anything that popped to the point where the talent wanted to come on board. Now it's a place where people really want to come and work with us. More and more writers are saying it's their first stop if they have something for cable. It used to be the last stop. It was the last stop when I was a producer. That tide has really turned.
EM: There seems to have been in influx of acclaimed theater and film actors committing to your series: Mary Louise-Parker in Weeds, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Peter O'Toole in The Tudors. What's attracting them to your network?
RG: We've worked hard to come up with things that conceptually are exciting. Script for script and writer for writer I think we have some of the best writing that's going on in television. That's all these actors really want, especially the ones who are reticent to do series. To get them to commit even to guest starring on a show for a run of episodes is a tall order. We can tell stories like the networks can't. We don't have to limit ourselves with the subject matter. We can present really flawed characters that don't have to be sanitized for advertisers. We can do certain things that other networks can't do. At the end of the day it's about what's on the page, which sounds like a cliché but it really is true.
EM: Who would have thought Peter O'Toole would do a television series?
RG: Peter O'Toole can do anything he wants. He still makes movies. I don't think it was his first inclination to tie himself down to a number of episodes on a television show but he looked at this part and what The Tudors has become and he couldn't refuse. David Duchovny is doing a show for us called Californication. He hasn't been on television in a number of years. I don't think he was contemplating doing another television series. We showed him a script by a really phenomenal young writer named Tom Kapinos and he flipped for it. I think David looked at the character and it was unlike anything he's ever played before. That was Jonathan Rhys Meyers' response to being offered the role of Henry VIII in The Tudors. I don't think in a million years he ever dreamed that someone would come to him with that part. We only did because we were trying to reinvent it and make it younger and do it in a way that had never been seen before. We gave him the first four scripts to read. They're all written by the same writer, Michael Hirst, so there was a really strong vision in those scripts. I don't think he would have done it had he not seen how great the scripts were going to be one after the other.
EM: Isn't that somewhat unusual in television, to be able to show an actor four completed scripts for a new series?
RG: Usually you only have the first script. The reason we had multiple scripts is we figured economically if we're going to make this series it was much smarter to make a number of episodes rather than make a very expensive one-off pilot. It benefited us in all kinds of ways when we got to production because we had almost all the scripts written. It is rare to have multiple scripts for a series. It's also rare that (one writer) has written every episode. There is no writing staff. Michael Hirst wrote the first ten. He has just completed seven of the next ten, which is what we're filming now for the second season. I don't know if I've ever heard of a series where one writer has written everything and there has never been another writer hired. Michael wanted to write them all. We didn't have to talk him into it.
EM: Is Showtime's relatively small distribution compared to other networks a concern for content creators or producers?
RG: It really isn't. Writers and producers know we're not the first place to go if you want a syndication hit because we don't ultimately produce enough episodes even to get to syndication. People come to us because they know they're going to be able to do something they aren't going to be able to do anywhere else and the creative process is going to be really satisfying to them. They can really write stuff that is not watered down. There are a lot of writers who are in overall deals at the studios and they know the mandate is to put a hit show on a major network and get it into syndication. It's just not the first priority for us, which isn't to say that down the road we don't want to build our shows into entities that have bigger ancillary revenues. We're doing that with DVDs and other kinds of distribution, including foreign. But there are limitations to what the ultimate windfall of profit is going to be compared to a network.
The flip side is, when you put a show on a broadcast network the odds are pretty good that it will disappear pretty quickly. They come and go. That's part of the trade off.
Originally posted at Jack Myers MediaVillage.com: Where television fans, industry professionals, and advertisers meet to read and discuss original columns, blogs, reviews, interviews, videos, photos and more. MediaVillage is dedicated to enabling viewers to SoundOff to TV executives and talent, and provide ongoing feedback to TV programmers and advertisers on TV viewers' passions, preferences and emotional connections.