The Roundtable featuring Peter Morgan, Issa Lopez, and a Producer
“I feel like I’m at the adult table at Thanksgiving when I’m supposed to still be at the kids’ table,” announces Francesca Sloane, moments into THR‘s TV Producer Roundtable. “It’s surreal.”
The Mr. & Mrs. Smith showrunner may have the shortest résumé among her peers gathered at the Fairmont Century Plaza for the live event, but she is by no means out of place. That became crystal clear when the conversation turned to show envy. “I was envious watching Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” says The Crown creator Peter Morgan. “Dealing with repressed British people for so long, I was peering over the fence thinking, ‘Look how much fun they’re having!’ ”
That was not the end of the love fest. Ripley writer-director Steven Zaillian picked Issa López’s True Detective: Night Country, and vice versa. “In Mexico, there’s bad envy and good envy,” explains López. “Bad envy will destroy you. Good envy inspires you. Ripley, for me, was a massive lesson in good envy.”
Hacks co-creator Jen Statsky, whose comedy represented the lone series on the panel not based on a known commodity, has that good envy of everyone else. “I have a show that isn’t based on IP or real life, and when I have even 40 people on the internet mad at me, I freak out,” says Statsky. “There’s tremendous pressure on you, the highest stakes. I hope you all have Xanax.” (Fallout directing executive producer Jonathan Nolan, for his part, chose Bluey on account of it being the only thing he likes watching with his kids.)
But it was hardly all fawning. When six of the top producers in TV sat down on May 16, they dug into dead pitches, their most intimidating scenes, and the bleak tone of recent executive conversations.
We’re in a period of serious belt-tightening in the industry right now. Who here thinks they’d have a hard time getting their show made if they took it to market today?
JEN STATSKY It is a hard time to make comedy. There’s a real downsizing of the number of comedies that are on the air and also of the budget allotted to comedies. Hacks didn’t have a star attached — because we didn’t [have Jean Smart] when we took it out. The show is essentially about two women talking, and one of them is in her 70s. That was a hard sell at the time! We were really lucky to get passionate executives who heard it and got it, but I think it would be much harder now. Comedy is not being as prioritized, even as it was in 2019, when we pitched it.
STEVEN ZAILLIAN That’s been my experience all along. They’re all hard to get made. At the end of the day, you have to convince one person — one person at that studio who has the ability to say yes. And if you can convince that person, you’re in good shape. That happened with the first movie I ever made. It was Searching for Bobby Fischer. And Brandon Tartikoff, who was running the studio at that point, happened to like chess and kids. He said, “Yes, and I don’t even care if we don’t make our money back. I want to make this movie.”
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