How Amazon Can Stop Losing in TV

From the former head of winning In TV

I have a number of things I want to write about soon but since this news is timely and since people have asked, I have some quick thoughts on Jen Salke leaving Amazon.

I have written many memos on what Amazon should do in my life, many of which have been very influential, but this will be the first one I write for free and that (presumably) will not be read by the CEO. C’est la vie!

So, the second head of Amazon Studios has left. And now there will be no Head of Amazon Studios, as the TV and film groups will report directly up to the head of Prime Video.

I never met Jen Salke. I have no animus toward her at all. Anyone would have accepted the job as Head of Amazon Studios after my departure. I don’t blame her for anything.

But if Amazon were happy with the output of the studio, this would not have happened. And as I have written from time to time, there was plenty to be unhappy about.

So let’s assess what went wrong and how to make it right.

It’s not that they never had successful shows. But their batting average was low and they tended to perform their worst when the stakes were high — with Rings of Power and Citadel, two of the most expensive shows ever. The other day Entertainment Strategy Guy and Matthew Belloni were chatting “on the pod,” as one does, and they concluded that The Boys and Jack Ryan were the strongest shows to have come out of the Salke era. But The Boys and Jack Ryan were both greenlit before Salke arrived.

The point being that there weren’t enough hits. It’s not that there were no hits. Terminal List, Reacher, and, above all, Fallout, were (and will be) strong shows, but it’s a game of percentages. Everyone will get a hit sometimes. If you get hits one time out of four, you’re average. If you get a hit one time out of three, you’re in the hall of fame. That’s baseball — and showbiz. Salke was there for 7 years. The output was not sufficient for 7 years.

Beyond hits, they had some sort of allergy to winning awards. Amazon was a total non entity at the Emmys and the Oscars, where we used to win quite often. What do you suppose their parties were like? Grim, I imagine. Funereal. Did you read Joyce’s The Dead? I wouldn’t know, myself, because we always had something big to celebrate. Anyway, they had the occasional nomination but almost no winners, no big winners, and not even some near miss strong contenders. Sad.

The thing of it is that what makes a good executive is not the ability to tell a good project from a bad project but to pick the one great project from an inbox full of twenty projects that the team wants to actually make and which therefore must all, in someone’s professional opinion, be pretty good — each of which has a few agents and maybe a major star pushing it, who is ready to be vocally disappointed if you pass. If you can do that successfully while also living within whatever constraints are coming at you from above and from the finance department, then you’re good at this. Most cannot do that with sufficient frequency.

Beyond hits and awards, progress was incredibly slow. It needs to go five times faster.

One final general observation: people who aren’t great at this tend to hire people who also aren’t great. Because how would they even know? They want someone who is well liked by agents and maybe not obviously smarter than themselves. So you get what you get.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE

TASK ONE: THE RIGHT TEAM, AT RIGHT SIZE, WITH THE RIGHT ATTITUDE

Firstly, having a big team in film or TV development is bad. We are not the IRS. The worst possible set up is where you have a big team and you believe in consensus decision making. Then there is no possible way to avoid being average. Because you are going to produce to the mean opinion of this huge team. Nothing good will ever come out of that. So the team has to be whittled down regardless. A friend of mine did a show not long ago at Amazon and they had two Standards and Practices execs! Crikey. I had zero S&P people.

Aside from the number of people, one also needs an attitude. There is something about having two S&P people per show and a big bureaucracy and doing big agency packages and moving slowly that … comes off as safetyist and fearful. That may be what we want from execs at the Federal Reserve, but it is not what we want from execs at entertainment companies. You simply have to be defiant of the forces that are happy to push you into a backward looking, conformist mindset. The way to be incredibly popular around town is to do every huge agency package that comes along and to always placate big show runners with 20 Emmys. But that’s not the way to win and our only priority — our only priority, I say to you sir or madame — must be to win. Or as Patton said, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Without such an attitude, how do nonintuitive successes like Transparent, the first streaming show to win an Emmy or Globe best series award, get made? How does Fleabag or even The Boys or Game of Thrones or Yellowstone get made? Great shows are contrarian and rule breaking. They aren’t obvious, consensus choices or everyone would have them. People need to get out their knives, put them in their teeth, and learn how to be nonconformists again.

I would have a real concern about the whole staff, if they have been brought up in the opposite environment. Unless you worked on Fallout, I’m very skeptical.

What is needed is a small team that is not consensus-oriented, who may not even get along, who do not care much what people think of them, who may not know what “consensus” means, who may not even speak English, who have a stellar, high bar, who drive too fast getting to work, who sometimes have horrible speed reading accidents, who were memorably kicked out of Exeter, who were with Shane Gillis last night, who are channeling Lord Byron, Richard Pryor and Ivy Wolk — who may be the Colonel Kurtz of executives —, and who consistently deliver things that are surprising and lead the industry. Because, in the end, the easiest and most fatal thing to say is “that’s fine, go ahead,” when it is actually not fine. You must have someone to whom something not artistically fine is not fine at all and who can see that and object. No matter how much money you spend and no matter how polished your appearances at events, none of it matters in the end — NOTHING MATTERS AT ALL — other than being memorable, being different, and being able to say, in the immortal words of Robert Duvall — “I got a hit.”

So the first thing that has to happen is a purge. Not in movies — Courtenay Valenti seems to have a hold on that and she’s great. But on the TV side I think yes.

TASK TWO: THE VP OF MASSIVE HITS

Next there are the tentpole shows with big IP.

008

Moneypenny

Warhammer

Red Dead Redemption

Similar others that I can’t remember now

Those are all good ideas. Based on Rings of Power I am very skeptical that they are going in a good direction. Some leader on the team needs to own just these “must win” big IP shows. We can come up with a name for this department, but the team must have single-threaded focus on this critical task.

One thing I would tell this team to do is to completely retcon everything Rings of Power so far. That was an experiment. It is now non-canonical and we are starting over from scratch. It basically never happened and we are literally throwing it away. Sorry! So all these shows are being developed (or redeveloped) from scratch.

Actually, we may produce one more episode of Rings of Power where everyone is slaughtered in an orgy of blood that would make John Woo blush and they are finally eaten by Tom Bombadil who then larks through the forest covered with gore singing “Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! Ring a dong! hop along! Fal lal the willow! Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!”

That’s job two (after the team is shrunk and “reimagined”). We might like for this tentpole category to solve all of our problems on its own — drive audience engagement, win awards, and do well oversees. However, one cannot live on $200M action fantasy shows alone.

Also, all of these shows are male skewing along with Reacher, Terminal List, Jack Ryan and the Boys. It might be nice to have something for the ladies, too. You know what doesn’t work that well? Taking a bunch of muscular tentpole action franchises and trying to turn those into big female draws. They’re simply in the wrong genre. It’s like turning Gilmore Girls and Sex and the City into male-skewing action shows. Why on Earth would you do that? Has it literally ever worked? So these action franchises can’t serve two masters. Let them be what they are.

So the network will wind up with

• Rings of Power

• Terminal List (this series of novels is awesome)

• Reacher

• Fallout

• Warhammer

• Some Bond show

That’s a great bunch of shows that should be supplemented with the next Maisel, Atlanta, The Bear, Fleabag, White Lotus…

TASK THREE: ORIGINALS, DRAMAS AND COMEDIES

Task three is to get some dramas and comedies to round out the ol’ lineup and here I don’t have unique advice except I already wrote up how to develop TV. One thing is most important: if you want to make great TV you can only have one priority, which is making great TV. You can’t have five things. You can’t be thinking about your lead in or your overall deals or your relationship with an agency or your awesome diversity plan, or anything else. Just one thing. There will be a big meeting where we chuck every distraction—elaborate memos, cautious junior execs, all the S&P people — straight out the window. Or we set them ablaze on a dragon-prowed longship off Santa Monica Beach, swallowed in a fiery tumulus of bureaucracy, in a glorious, mead-drenched midnight funeral for the gods of caution and conformity.

What we focus on is great scripts.

Another thing to be abandoned is any top down mandate of what shows must be unless we can all agree that the current thing is never the next thing. If you want your Game of Thrones, find something without dragons. That’s just how it works: never copy, always be new.

I have ideas about what will resonate with audiences now, but they’re specific to me and we don’t need to go into it here. Suffice to say I think there are opportunities to experiment with some new formats.

CONCLUSION

Amazon is starting from a pretty strong place actually insofar as they have money and the second highest viewership after Netflix (even if that is buoyed by TVOD and their Channels program). The point is, they have an audience. There are customers out there ready to try, and eager to enjoy, whatever is delivered next. That’s a great start.

And it’s not that complicated from there.

• The tentpole program has to be working smoothly with clear ownership

• There has to be a high global bar for everything tentpole or otherwise

• The right team needs to exist

Bon chance!

RP