Why the TV boom makes life harder, not easier, for independent producers

the face of television, Madmen and Breaking Bath. In our conversation, Wayne goes deep into the nitty gritty of deal making in the current landscape. She's candid about how hard it's become for producers to make a good living despite the boom times in TV, and she also talks about how her adventures inspired the launch of her television school dot com subscription venture. Christina Wayne, CEO of Assembly Entertainment, Welcome

to Strictly Business. Thanks so much for having me, Thanks for coming buy on one of the first crisp fall days here in New York City. It's a beautiful day.

It's a good day to talk about the television business. Um, Christina, you have been You've had a range of experience from being on the programming side and the buying side at a MC where you helped bring to life a couple of little shows called Madman and Breaking Dad, and more recently the last bunch of years, you have been an independent producer, putting together shows and using you know, interesting

different financial models to make your programming work. And right now Assembly Entertainment you have a pod deal with I t V America, so you're part of that global village of programming that's coming and being financed and coming from all sides. UM, let's talk about the job of a producer and how much your role as a packager and developer has changed in just a few years as we've seen the explosion of demand for original content. Well, definitely changed.

I performed my company Assembly Entertainment about five years ago, a little over five years ago, and when I first started the first two years, my job was similar to the development process that I had done when I was UM doing scripted at AMC or even when I was

at an international studio Cineflix. UM when I was doing scripted there, you start with an idea, you go to writers, you develop, you package the show together, but really all you needed at that time was a great idea with a really good writer, a great script, and you went to the market and I saw that there were new buyers back five years ago coming not as much as

there are now. The platforms did not exist. There was no Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, but a lot of the basic cable channels, and even places like HBO started pushing for scripted programming at their sister UM channel, Cinemax things like that. People started audening out their channels in terms of growing their scripted So all of a sudden, a bunch of new buyers came to the market and we would take stuff out, and over the first two years of having my company, we sold pretty much everything we took to

the market. There were about i'd say thirteen fourteen shows that we took out, and they all went into development. Not all of them got made, but um one or two of them got made, which is kind of the ratio. You have one out of ten usually is your ratio of what you're hoping for the last two years of being a producer. Now, with all the platforms, there is such a huge demand for content that one would assume that being a producer would make my life much easier

it's actually made it more difficult. What has happened is that TV is such an incredible medium now, it is so high level the programming that's being made. You have every a list showrunner, actor, director coming with their passion project.

I often find myself waiting to take out a show to the buyers and you have Germo del Toro sitting in the waiting room, you have George Clooney, you have every single top level person who's you know, Germo had just won an Academy Award, and you're sitting there going, oh, yeah, my little great show, Um, what do we have? So it definitely has become more difficult. And I have noticed that unless you package your show to the nth degree, it does not sell. You're talking about soup to nuts

with writers, showrunner, star director, the whole. You don't necessarily need a line producer because they can always hire that, because that's not going to be You need somebody competent, but they're not going to look at that as the sort of bells and whistles of must make TV. And so right now the game is straight to series orders with a list talent. And you know you see that

with Reese Witherspoon's company. You see that with all of these packages now that are going out, um, and so I I have now moved from being focused solely on development to also being a packager, which really was never that was always an agent's job. And so it has really sort of taken over what I do. And UM, I do it. And thankfully I've been in the business long enough that it's not impossible, but it certainly is not what I came to the business to do. So

it's quite different than when I started. Does it affect um that I would imagine that the need to have all those elements assembled at the at the very get go, would you say? Even sometimes before a script is written, usually we package stuff that is written. It's very hard to bring talent to a piece of material that's just a pitch. So if we're going out with a pitch, we have to have a showrunner level writer be bringing

it out and so who commissions that script? Is that pressure on you to pay for that initial initial script before you even set it up. Sometimes I can give be the example of our show that we have at ABC right now called Mercury thirteen. So Jessica Chastain brought me an idea. That was a passion project for her, and it's based on a true story, a story I

did not know. It's about thirteen female pilots from the early nineteen sixties that were recruited by a program that was set up UM by NASA, and it was to train the women to be the first female astronauts to go into space. So it was a story I didn't know, a story about. UM, these very strong women and the obstacles they faced in the early sixties in that world. So we went out and looked at a bunch of

different writers. We wound up UM. I had worked with Todd coomber Nikki, who is the screenwriter who wrote Sully. He he and I had sold a show to T and T a few years before that. UM, you know, he was just coming off of Sully. He was UH an incredibly hot writer at the time, and we knew that if we wanted to go to the market, we needed to write the script. So I t be under my deal. UM had Todd write the script and they paid for the script, and then we took that to

the market as a package with the script already written. UM. Jessica and I and Todd went all over to all the buyers and took it around town and Channing DUNGEI bought it at ABC. So that really shows the level in which you need right now, which is highly competitive. But you had Jessica Chastain, which is incredible and she's

a phenomenal producer. Do you think, UM, do you think that the I know it's probably hard to answer, but do you think that the one intent you talked about, the one intent ratio of development to actually getting things made? Do you is your sense that that's going to go up even even with the challenge of getting things placed. It still feels to me like the ratio that's going on right now. There is a bit of with new

platforms coming to the table um. When Suzanne Daniels took over at YouTube Premium, Uh, she reached out to me and because when a when a new platform comes to the market, a lot of people who are experienced in the business don't necessarily a no. These new platforms have opened because it takes a little while to get the

buzz out. There's now you know, Facebook, there's a bunch of new places um, and they want to have experienced people come to them with shows it's not necessarily at the forefront of your mind when you're making your list of places if someplace has literally just started. So this was two years ago when Suzanne reached out to me and UM we did a deal in which I would bring her three projects and she would green light one

to pilot and under a put pilot deal. So that UM made it a little bit different and a little bit um more of a path to production. So I saw that as a positive in terms of that these places need quality content and they're not necessarily on their first swings going to take major risks with people that they don't trust. So but you know, not every place is banging down your door to do that, So they

are looking at the tried and true. That's why you know people like Ryan Murphy and Shawn to Rhymes get these massive deals because Netflix just wants to know their pipeline is going to be filled with They know what they're getting from those people, and they know people. You know, there's nobody more valuable than somebody like a like an uber shore runner that can get a ship. You know, they know, for better for worse, they can get that

show on its feet exactly. UM and the kind of deal that you talked about, that you sketched out with that you set out with Suzanne. Those kinds of deals are probably few and far between at a traditional linear network at this moment. Probably, I guess it depends on the level of producers show runner. It's the one time it's happened to me. I'm very thankful for it. That's our new show that we're now going into production on

right now for YouTube Premium with USA reback. It's called It's a Man's World, and we'll be shooting this December. So you know, to me, that's when somebody like that, you've known for a long time, you've had a relationship, they understand the work that you do, understands and believes that you can deliver a quality product. That's sort of the best place to be as a producer. And this you said you set this deal about two years ago. Did it take that long to find the right piece

of material? We under the deal had to bring them three projects. So over the past two years we brought them three shows. One was a pitch, One was a script that was already written, a spec script that I had optioned a while before. One was actually it's a Man's World was actually a script we had previously sold to Bravo as a one hour and it was in turn around. So they did deals for all three of those and then gave notes and the one that was

a pitch, the writers had to write the script. The other two we had to turn It's a Man's World from an hour into a half hour, and then UM, the other one they had the writer do some extensive rewrite sonics that was an hour as well, and so it took about a year and a half and so about six months ago they made the decision to pick the one that we wanted. Unfortunately, one of the writers of one of those projects passed away at that time,

so it limited UM, which is very sad. He was a very lovely man who was the UM, Charlie Bull, and so it was sort of this very surprising tragic thing. So that limited the decision to two projects rather than one, I mean, rather than three. Right during that time, UM, when you have when you know, when you're juggling a pitch and you're juggling you know, an outline, and then you have something you know that with Teresa rebeca very well known, a brand named writer and playwright, How is

it for your company as on a financial basis? Is it is it? Um? Is it a struggle to keep those that many things juggling in the air for a for an extended period? You know, we're what you just described as well outside of the traditional chaos of of a traditional broadcast pilot season. Well, the nice thing about platform and cable buyers is that they don't adhere to a calendar, right, so you can really start and stop

any time of the year. Um. What I have found though with our show at ABC, it's not really adhering to any calendar. Also, maybe it's because of the Disney Fox merger. There seems to be a lot of um waiting around to see what's going to happen when that closes. There's a lot going on there. Yeah, So um, I

actually like the idea of not having a schedule. I think it just allows the material to get to the place where it needs to be and then you move forward, which gives you the time to really nurture a project, which I like. Is there a downside? Though? We've we've often heard from writers and creatives that that kind of the lack of a schedule can be challenging because they don't know if something is going to get going. They

don't know. Sometimes their ability to get other work in the in the inter room can be can be constricted. Although I know those those rules are changing a little bit. Um Well, if you look at the timeline of what happened with I'm Dying up here, that was a very long time. That was a Showtime series that produced for two seasons, correct, and so we went in and pitched that. I can't even remember what year it was, it must have been that we went around and watched that and

Showtime bought it as a pitch. It was then a year process of Dave Flabatt, the showrunner, writing the pilot script. We probably had a year after the pilot's script was turned in while we waited around for Showtime to make a decision. I think it was not for lack of Showtime's enthusiasm. I think it was literally them looking at their shows and seeing when they had an opening in

their schedule for a new show. There were a couple shows that were ending that they were waiting for their seasons to be done, and they were really looking at other material that was coming in at the same time. So that was quite a long time for the cable schedule. Usually things happen, they usually tell you within six months of a script being turned in, but this that was

a really long time. UM. Talking back to it's a man's world, can you talk about I know you can't talk dollars and cents, but can you talk about the economics of doing a YouTube pilot? Is it comparable to a basic cable or premium cable type of a deal? It is. It's a half hours and it's the first half hour I've ever made. I'm used to being in the world of hours, which you know, have grown. The budgets, I would say, from when we first did the pilot for mad Men UM, which was in a little bit

over three million dollars. You're looking now at pilots that are being made, you know, in the hour round eight nine million dollars for a pilot. So they're very expensive right now, not all of them are. Some of them are more like five million. But they have gone up in the half hour space. I think YouTube premium is squarely in the half hour budget range. They actually, during

the term of our deal raised the level. When we first did the deal, they went up slightly and said, you know, we see how competitive the marketplace is now to cast to get quality directors. And they've actually brought up the budget where this week discussing exactly what our budget and schedule are, so um, we should know by nets week and be able to get going because of that, because the realities are. It's this is the other challenge. With so much programming being made, no one is available.

So you look at the landscape creative talent wise correct, so you're looking at who's out there. There's a ton of great directors out there working right now, and thankfully there are phenomenal female directors now being given opportunities that weren't. There's a lot of diverse talent out there, but they

are busy. It is so hard right now to say, okay, I have a pilot shooting in three months from now at least when we got green light back in August, and find somebody that can actually do it for the time you're looking at. So you can't say, oh, I

want you to do this for five dollars. You have to entice people to be able to fit it in their schedule because they have so many options right and in this process, I would imagine there's a lot of pleading with talent agents to to to arrange people's schedules.

Would you say the agencies have become in in arranging that kind of that kind of base level staffing of a show that they would you say that they've become more important for the sought after talent beyond the beyond the stars, I'm talking about even just the basics of a crew, or basically when you are green light to production, pretty much all of the agencies and management companies are there and helpful and will really vet your lists of who's available, who's not. And I've seen that there for

the most part, very helpful. It's really more when you're trying to package something that you're taking to the market that because there's so much work, nobody's really interested anymore in putting their talent or their director with a project that hasn't sold yet. So I have found that is if you go to the agencies for that, it's much more difficult. They're happy to have you meet with the young playwright that wants to get into TV, who really

could be the most talented up and coming writer. It could be the next Bo williman Um who I met when he was still a Juilliard and I gave him his first writing job when I was at AMC. He came in with a pitch um and started his TV career. UM. So he didn't go to pilot. It didn't. It was actually sort of a a precursor to Underground. It was set on a plant, southern plantation, and it dealt with the lives of the people that lived on the plantation. And um, at that particular moment in time, I don't

think it was what AMC was doing right. Um. But you know, I'm always open and eager to meet with young talent, with new directors and and break people because you know, I'm just looking for people that have great voices and are saying something unique and different that hasn't been said before. Um. But in terms of attaching people to things, I find the agencies are less willing to do that when they know that there's so much work out there, right, you don't want to lock somebody up

for for too long. UM. Again, working with YouTube, with you know, a very newish platform, even in the world of a lot of new platforms, does it concern you or the or the folks that you're working with? It I TV America that you know, do you have to have a discussion about what is the potential back end here before you commit to something like that. All of these deals have really shifted. UM. I have found as a producer you never see back end, regardless it's a myth.

I think it's a myth. UM. I think even when a show is profitable for a producer. I will not name the show, but there is a very successful show, UM that I knew intimately the inner workings of, and I knew it was profitable, and the producer and the show runner at the end of however many seasons the show had run, we're telling me that the studio was telling them that the show was still in the red and if you just looked at the show, you would go,

there's no way that that's possible. And they actually had to sue the studio for their back end. So it is incredibly difficult to get back end on a show. So a lot of these new platforms like Netflix, they buy you out and they give you your deal upfront. So whether your show is going to be Game of Thrones or whether it's something that is you know, a flash in the pan and going away after the first season, they estimate what they think the potential could be and

they give that to your up front. And as a producer, I think just in terms of business, it's probably makes more sense to do a model like that, because even when you have one of the most successful shows on TV, you're still going to have to fight for that back end and probably won't get the reality of what it's really worth. Wow, And again, how do you I'm curious how how does a YouTube or Netflix estimate what that back end like, I have no idea. You would have

to ask that super secret mathematical formulas. I just this is all fascinating because it is all changing so much, it is, and to try and keep up with it. You know, when you have I have um an exclusive overhead deal at I TV Studios America, so my deals are pre negotiated. It doesn't matter what platform or channel I sell to. My deal is the same because it's with I t V for all of these shows. So it's really about I t V than negotiating the deal

with that particular buyer. It doesn't really affect me because it's already sentenced one what I get interesting and so that's obviously that is one of the advantages of aligning with an I t V something, a company with some real heft and real um, you know, clout in the marketplace and a lot of resources that they can bring to bear. And and we've all been seeing a lot more kind of you know, cross border productions, seeing a lot of British and US co productions. I know you've done,

You've done several over the years. It would seem like that that is a that that would be a big benefit to producer, to a producer, to have somebody like that vacue. But do you ever does that the fact that your deal is already pre negotiated, is that ever an issue in terms of setting something up. It hasn't been an issue in terms of actually doing the deal. Um, when we sell something, what is becoming more and more apparent is that every buyer wants to own their content. Yeah.

So originally when we sold I'm Dying up Here, I was running Cineflix Studios, and it became very clear that Showtime wanted to own the show, and so Showtime in house studio took over the show, and so it gave it a lot more likelihood of going to production because they owned it. And if you look at Netflix, they want to own their shows. Amazon wants to own their shows, AMC Stars they all want to own their shows. So

it narrows. There's lots of buyers, but it narrows the buyers that are willing to work with an independent studio or the studio for that matter, Apple does, uh, YouTube does um? I think Facebook does. So it there really aren't the fifteen buyers that you say that are out there for studios. There are for producers. But if I didn't have a deal, I'm just an unemployed producer. So as a producer in a in a world where back end is increasingly becoming a myth, you you survive. Your

livelihood comes from the upfront fees. Yes, so obviously the motivation to have things both in development and obviously you know, trying to get on the air. Yeah. Development, Um still means I'm just an unemployed producer because I don't make any money in development. The writer does. So Really the way that I make money is shows in production. I I have a deal, so I make a salary out of that. And without a deal, I think it's very hard.

I think there's a lot of young people who are coming to the business right now saying, oh my gosh, there's so many buyers. I'm going to go out and you know, sell five shows and make a living doing this. But your show might not get greenland for a couple of years. Like I said, a one to tend ratio, the majority of them are not going to move forward, So you could spend years upon years not receiving a dime for your a lot of work that you have to put in. So that's why you see most producers

who have experience and have made multiple shows. It's a man's world. I think is my ninth TV series that I've made UM over a period since two thousand five, I've pretty much been in production on a show since two thousand five every year. So when you look at people that are sort of at my level, UM, the way that they can sustain is by having a deal. It's a high wire act, I would imagine. You know it is because as the buyer's shrink in terms of the buyers that want to work with studios, you have

to weigh your options. So you really have to say how many shows can I sell under this del versus how many shows can I sell without a studio. But you have to also have an income, so and you know, it would be incredibly expensive to pay writers to write scripts.

It's incredibly expensive to whenever we take a show to the market, we're flying writers sometimes from New York or the UK, putting them up for a week in l A. Those costs are incredibly prohibitive if you're an independent producer, so you do need the backing of a bigger company, right, either that or a trust fund. If you could put your if you could put your mind back to your

days as a buyer. As on the programming side, how do you think and granted it's a much different world, but how do you think the buyer Christina Wayne would have responded to these shifts in you know, deeply packaged projects coming to the market, the push for straight to series orders. Do you think that on the buying side that this is a good thing for the quality? I think that there's a ton of programming right now that's being made that is just filler. I think it is

pretty mediocre. And the there are the amazingly beautiful of Dune shows. I'm a huge fan of The Crown and things like that, you know, Handmaid's Tale. These are shows that are exquisite and deserve all the kudos that they get. UM. The thing that I miss from back in the days of when I was at AMC is that because there were so few programs being made, the ones that rose to the top we're quite good. There wasn't a lot of just mediocre programming being made because people weren't willing

to spend the money on just mass content. And so now I just see that there's an onslaught of just very forgettable programming, and I, UM, I worry about that moving forward, having just had an experience on a very high quality show at a top level network. We're talking about I'm dying up here where because there's so there's so much choice out there that your show isn't getting the attention from people like you and the critics that when you know, we launched Even Copper, which was for

BBC America. When I was executive producing that, UM, the landscape was very different, just literally what five years ago, six years ago? Yeah, And so we launched that and with just the standard marketing dollars, we were able to be on lots of different areas in journalism, So it wasn't just the TV pages that the show was being written about. It was written about in um more historical context fashion context, because it was a historical drama, and so the ability to get an audience to that show.

The viewership was over a million viewers per episode. That is incredibly difficult to get now because you have five hundred shows being produced at this moment in time, and so you're not getting the pr that you normally would get when there were only you know, two hundred shows being produced, and your ability to sustain and continue is not going to be there in the same way that it was before because if you don't hit those ratings out of the gate um buyers are not as patient

as they want for to grow an audience. Have you found that it's it's either ratings or lots and lots of acclaim from all you know from critics gushing about is that enough to keep a show on the air. I think it's you have to have one or the other. But even with a lot of critical acclaims, sometime it still doesn't keep the show on the air. Yeah. Well, Christina, thank you for taking us through the ins and outs

of dealmaking for the independent producer. It's fascinating and I know one of the reasons you're so conversed in on this is that you have recently launched an kind of an online education venture for people interested in getting into the content business that you called TV school. Tell us about that, sure. About a year ago, I launched Television

School dot com. And one of the main reasons I did it is that I often speak at some of the colleges that have film programs, and what I noticed, whether it's Columbia, n y U or Brooklyn College, is that they are still traditionally focused predominantly on teaching students about the film business, but there isn't as comprehensive an

education on the TV business. And the reality is, because the TV business is booming and the film business is shrinking, most of these students are going to go out into the world and get a job in TV because there are way more jobs. And so I had tons of students coming to me asking me questions after I would be sort of a guest person teacher for the class, and I realized the same questions were being asked over

and over. And when I work with a lot of writers, whether they are super seasoned or just getting into the business, there's sort of certain structural UM, just touchstones that you kind of need to all have the same language for so you can work through developing a pilot script or a pilot pitch. And so my husband was always saying to me when he would listen to me on phone calls with people, just write a book. You say the

same thing over and over a day after day. And so instead of doing that, I decided I would put like a master class UM, a series of episodes that talk about different aspects of what it is to be and get into the TV business. How to write a pilot script, how to get an agent, how to maneuver

through a deal. It's really the soup to nuts of working in the TV business and my twenty five years of experience of what I've learned and sort of the reality of it, not the sort of fake like, oh, you'll make lots of money, because that's not always the case. And so I really wanted to give people, UM the real information of what you have to go through, how it works, how long things take, UM, what the reality is.

I have a lot of young writers that come in when we actually do sell something, they think they're getting rich, and then when look at the deal, they're like, oh, maybe I do have to keep a day job for a little white hard to pay the rent on this. Yes, and so it's you know, even when you're a staff writer, it's better than working at Starbucks. But when you're getting your first job as a staff writer on a show,

you're not making an enormous amount of money. And so I think it's just really important to get the real information to people. Um and so anybody who's interested in working in television. I think it's a great just sort of overview of how to work in the business and how to get your toe in there and really what to do. So that's why I started that. And is it something where you pay per episode or you you pay a fee and get a get a number of

episodes over you do. There's seven episodes right now. The first one you can watch for free to get a flavor of what it feels like, and it's a hundred dollars. I wanted to keep the cost down so that pretty much anybody could afford to buy that. There's also downloadable elements. One of the biggest things that most people make the mistake on when they want to take out a project. Their producer, a director or a writer or even an actor that wants to get in and you know, make

something for themselves. They come up with an idea in a vacuum and they don't know the marketplace. So what

we do is very important. Yeah, we constantly update information who all the buyers are, who are the people that work at all of these different places, and what they have in development and production, so that you don't waste six months to a year of your time coming up with a pitch or a script that you then learn, uh, some platform or some buyer is about to launch as a TV series and you've wasted an entire year of your time, And we update that every couple of months.

And so part of UM enrolling in TV school is the ability to constantly have that renewed information. So you're kind of part of an information club that you get, which I think makes a huge difference when you're going out and just starting. So you get sort of insider info on what's going on. Yeah, it sounds like a good sounds like a good resource. Have you had much uptake on the classes, Yeah, it's um. It goes through

waves probably around graduation season exactly. There's a lot of parents who are listening to their children saying that they either want to go to one of these film schools or graduating from college who want to get into the business, and they are buying it for their kids to say, Okay, here's the real deal of what it really takes. Are you willing to do that? Uh? I guess my last question for you here is, UM, would would you in

this environment, as as fraught as it is. I can see your enthusiasm for being a producer in packaging material? Would you ever go back to the executive side if the right if a compelling opportunity came up, would you go back to being a programmer or a buyer? I would, you know, I've been thinking about it a lot recently, UM, and I think that there's a lot of new opportunity with new technology. My whole career has always been based on wanting to um challenge myself and learn something new

and about every five years. I sort of, you know, started on the programming so I to the channel, learned what a domestic buyer did, then went into an international studio to really learn the international market and the studio side of the business. And now as a producer, I sort of get to take all of those skills and put them together. And I love the more entrepreneurial idea of working at some of these places that are really fusing tech and um content, and so I find that

incredibly exciting. If there were an opportunity that would be able to really be somewhere where I could grow and learn something new and really attack a new challenge, then I would absolutely be open to that. Great. Well, thank you so much for stopping buying giving us a glimpse into the into the life and the work of an independent producer in this in this crazy moment for television.

Appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Thanks for listening. Be sure to join us next week for another episode of Strictly Business.