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Can Showtime fill the void?
HBO's pay-cable rival sees post-'Sopranos' opportunity
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff | June 10, 2007
If mob bosses are famously voracious and greedy, so are TV viewers. So once HBO fans finish mourning Tony Soprano -- wherever his journey happens to end tonight -- they'll soon be wondering what to watch next.
Showtime hopes to lure them into changing the channel.
Next Sunday, the rival pay-cable network will unveil "Meadowlands," an eight-part series about a picturesque British town whose residents all are in witness protection.
In August, Showtime will premiere the comedy "Californication," starring David Duchovny as a womanizing Hollywood writer, and bring back a third season of "Weeds," about a pot-dealing suburban mom. In the fall, the network will offer the second seasons of "Dexter," about a principled serial killer with a day job in forensics, and "Brotherhood," a Rhode Island-set story of politicians intertwined with the mob.
It's a striking lineup of flawed and dark protagonists, arriving at a time when all eyes are on the sources of boundary-pushing fare. If "The Sopranos" established a creative reputation for HBO and premium cable in general, it also whet viewers' appetites for more. And for Showtime, this moment represents an opportunity and a challenge -- how to stake a claim to originality, and entice viewers to pay for it, in a TV landscape increasingly filled with the dark, edgy, and flawed.
"It really is about distinguishing ourselves from everybody else that's out there ," says Robert Greenblatt, Showtime's president of entertainment. "HBO isn't what it used to be, and our main competition is really everybody who's doing really original work."
Still, it's hard to think of Showtime without comparing it to HBO; both operate on a subscription model and aren't beholden to advertisers, but they represent different stages in the network life cycle. HBO has the established reputation and twice as many subscribers: 30 million, compared to Showtime's 14.5 million. Showtime is still building a brand and establishing a presence.
For some producers, that is an attraction in itself. Blake Masters, the creator of "Brotherhood," said that he pitched his series to Showtime first, figuring he would fare better on a network that was striving to improve. "As the upstart new kid on the block, Showtime was hungrier for new shows and more willing to take a risk on an edgy show like mine," he said.
And as HBO executives know well these days, being on top means that any dips and failures are more visible. Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO Entertainment, acknowledges the accusations of creative stagnation, but says she's excited about her network's upcoming lineup, which includes the metaphysical surfer drama "John From Cincinnat i" and the New Zealand-born comedy "Flight of the Conchords."
"We're in the creativity business. We're not in the sure-shot business," Strauss says. "So we're going to be up there taking the same kinds of swings we were taking when 'The Sopranos' was on the air. But every time you miss, there's the same spotlight on you. We were missing in the same way when 'The Sopranos' went on the air, but no one was paying attention."
Showtime has had its misses, too; the 2005 series "Fat Actress" drew some tepid reviews, and the critically-acclaimed "Huff" never gained the ratings traction to last past two seasons. But many of the network's recent offerings, from "Dexter" and "Brotherhood" to "The Tudors," the 16th-century costume drama that wraps up its first season tonight at 10, have drawn attention and press disproportionate to their audiences -- which tend, by the nature of the business, to be a fraction of those on broadcast TV.
The emphasis, executives and producers say, has been on raising the network's profile. And to build his current lineup, Greenblatt says he has drawn on lessons from his first go- round as a TV executive, when he developed shows in the early days of Fox.
"We were the fourth network in an environment when everyone said a fourth network will never survive," he says. "In order to make a statement and attract producers . . . we had to go out on a limb and do things that were really bold." At Fox, he helped develop such series as "The Simpsons," "The X-Files," and "Ally McBeal."
Greenblatt later left Fox to produce shows on his own, and had his greatest success at HBO, as a force behind "Six Feet Under." When he came to Showtime in 2003, the network had a reputation for niche shows such as "Soul Food" and "Queer as Folk," and had greenlit "The L Word." Greenblatt declared that he wanted to identify shows that had unusual vision behind them.
At around that time, Jenji Kohan , a longtime television writer, was shopping a show with a simple pitch: suburban widowed pot-dealing mom. "I knew this was going to be a cable show," she says. "The subject matter just was not network-appropriate. So I did the rounds. You start at HBO."
Kohan says HBO executives told her they weren't interested in series involving kids. But at Showtime, she says, she got an instant response. "It was good timing," she says. "They wanted to start making noise and we came along and we were noisy."
In fact, Greenblatt says, he had hoped the show would draw a bigger outcry. "When I first heard it I thought, this is absolutely right for us," he recalls. "It seemed like exactly the right kind of tone or subject matter, which would garner some controversy. I wish it had garnered even more . . . . People were OK with some of the extreme things that we were doing."
Greenblatt set about making other changes, too, abandoning the practice of filming most shows in Canada to save money, pumping up budgets to improve production values. His budgets, he says, tend to be smaller than HBO's, but in line with those at some broadcast networks.
"I did make it clear to everybody that the shows had to look and sound and feel like the best shows on television, and you have to spend a little bit more money" to achieve that, Greenblatt says.
In many cases, those expenditures are palpable -- in the intricate sets and costumes for "The Tudors," for instance, and the title sequence of "Dexter," a tour de force of smashed mosquitoes, squeezed blood oranges and sliced ham, meant to evoke the violent undercurrents of everyday life. ("That of course is at the essence of the series and they went for it," says John Goldwyn, an executive producer. "They got it. Bob got it.")
Those rich productions have yielded some high-profile actors, from Mary-Louise Parker, who turned down a role on "Desperate Housewives" and took the lead in "Weeds" instead, to "Six Feet Under" star Michael C. Hall, who didn't plan to return to TV until he read the "Dexter" script. Showtime announced more casting coups this week: Peter O'Toole has signed to play Pope Paul III on "The Tudors," Keith Carradine will take a role on "Dexter," and Mary-Kate Olsen will join "Weeds."
And producers say they're drawn to the freedoms inherent in premium cable, from the relative simplicity of 12-episode arcs to the sorts of characters that might still be hard sells on broadcast TV, even in an age of "House." ("Dexter," Greenblatt says, "would frighten the pants off of a broadcast network. You could never take that show to Madison Avenue and say, 'OK, let's start showing ads! ' ") Several talk about a paucity of notes from Showtime executives, though the ones they get are pointed; Michael Hirst, the writer and creator of "The Tudors," was told to feel free to push boundaries of sex and violence, while the producers of "Dexter" were told not to make their show too gothic or gloomy. And Masters, who spent 13 years writing feature film scripts before he landed "Brotherhood," said he's convinced that premium TV offers more opportunity for writers than movies do.
"If you want to write movies like the movies they were making in the early ' 70s," Masters says, "you're doing cable television."
Showtime is also staking a claim in documentaries, and went in hard pursuit of "This American Life," the popular public radio show that had once walked away from offers to develop a show for broadcast networks. Ira Glass, the series' host and executive producer, says that only Showtime agreed to his unusual demand: that if he and his radio colleagues didn't like the pilot they produced, they could walk away.
And Glass says that while the broadcast networks had explicit demands -- one suggested that most stories focus on 18-to-25-year-olds, the advertisers' holy grail demographic -- Showtime largely left them alone.
"We're working for a boutique, basically," Glass says. "We were lucky enough that we were one of the projects they saw as trying to reshape their identity. But the tradeoff is, obviously, it's a much smaller audience available to you."
That was an education to Glass, and a key difference between pay cable and most other TV networks, which depend on ad revenues and have an obsessive devotion to ratings. Pay cable by its nature draws smaller audiences; high-rated "Sopranos" episodes have drawn more than 12 million viewers on first airing, compared to the 30 million or so who watch "American Idol." And premium cable executives insist that they measure their success in different ways. Trade magazines have reported that "The Tudors " drew 1.2 million viewers on its premiere night -- a respectable showing for cable.
But Showtime executives prefer to talk about exposure over time; they say 4 million people saw the series overall, through TV, streaming video, video on demand , and DVRs .Glass says Showtime executives have assured him that publicity and buzz are more important than ratings. They were " explicit in saying where they are in their business plan is that they were trying to change the way people perceive them," Glass says. "And the most important thing is that people know this is happening. And then everything else will follow."
Still, after an intense publicity campaign to launch his show this spring, Glass says he's still surprised at how quiet the reaction has been, especially among his public radio fan base.
"When I meet people , when I go out and give speeches at public radio stations . . . they say, 'I'm looking forward to watching the TV show . . . when it comes out on DVD, ' " Glass says. "It's so rare for me to meet somebody who's actually seen it."
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net.
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