THR "TV's Top 5" podcast: "Minx" creator Ellen Rapoport on feminism, comedy...

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Bob Jersey

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Mar 11, 2022, 10:24:08 AM3/11/22
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...and going "tit for tat" with male nudity on the HBOmax series that could have ended up on Peacock (how fitting)...


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Bob Jersey

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Dec 12, 2022, 8:01:31 PM12/12/22
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Found this only to note that Zas budget cuts forced the canning of Minx despite a renewal... Lionsgate was given back the complete series to offer to other providers...
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Moi, March 11th:

Adam Bowie

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Dec 13, 2022, 5:34:52 AM12/13/22
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I think the key thing here is not just that they were cancelling a previously renewed show, but that they'd just been about to wrap the second season - so essentially everything's in the can already. Although the studio that made it, Lionsgate, can shop the series around, you've got to imagine that WBD has already paid for it regardless. Another form of tax write-off?

It was nothing to write home about, and I'm not sure where dramatically they could take the series, but I enjoyed season one, and I liked the leads. I'm guessing the seventies setting meant that it wasn't super-cheap to make.

I see that WBD is busily cancelling and pulling lots of stuff off its service. So not only is S5 of Westworld still cancelled by S1-4 are being pulled off HBO Max. Meanwhile The Nevers is never going to air the second part of its first season - well at least not on HBO Max. Sad to see that Love Life has been canned too, as I liked that show. 


Adam

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Mark Jeffries

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Dec 13, 2022, 9:51:18 AM12/13/22
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The way things are going, I'm wondering that if Sky and the ABC Australia make a third season of "Frayed," it'll end up on HBO Max. For me, this is in hopes that a third season will give a substantive plot line to Kerry Armstrong's character, because she deserves it.

Mark Jeffries
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PGage

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Dec 15, 2022, 1:51:17 AM12/15/22
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I’m just catching up to this. Westworld getting the Zas treatment is surprising. Not that it got cancelled (I think I got through the second season, but maybe not I got so bored and no longer recall), but it was a prestige show at one point. Are they going to take down Deadwood or The Wire at some point? Larry Sanders or Curb Your Enthusiasm? 

Most surprising, Deadline suggests that the explanation lies in Zas wanting to use Westworld to start his own FAST (Free Ad Supported Streaming Television) outlet. Of course FAST is a natural for the Discovery brand, but Westworld, especially Season 1, seems less well suited for that than, say Mythbusters.



On Tue, 13 Dec 2022 at 2:34 AM Adam Bowie <ad...@adambowie.co.uk> wrote:
(Snip) I see that WBD is busily cancelling and pulling lots of stuff off its service. So not only is S5 of Westworld still cancelled by S1-4 are being pulled off HBO Max. Meanwhile The Nevers is never going to air the second part of its first season - well at least not on HBO Max. Sad to see that Love Life has been canned too, as I liked that show. 


Adam

On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 1:01 AM 'Bob Jersey' via TVorNotTV <tvor...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Found this only to note that Zas budget cuts forced the canning of Minx despite a renewal... Lionsgate was given back the complete series to offer to other providers...
B

Moi, March 11th:
...and going "tit for tat" with male nudity on the HBOmax series that could have ended up on Peacock (how fitting)...

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Mark Jeffries

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Dec 15, 2022, 10:06:59 AM12/15/22
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I would guess that "Curb" would be safe.  In the case of "Larry Sanders," Sony owns the show and if WBD ever lets the license run out, they'll sell it to another pay streamer.

Mark Jeffries
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Adam Bowie

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Dec 15, 2022, 10:51:56 AM12/15/22
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What I hadn't really appreciated until the Zas regime arrived, is the ongoing costs that a lot of these shows (and films) have just being listed on the service. 

Historically it made sense that channels/streamers paid on a limited time licencing basis to air a show. The rights to Friends went to Netflix for $100m a year or whatever. When those rights expire, Warners could shop the show to the next customer. And of course, the show was created in a time when the various creatives on the show got percentages of all those rights. So even with the show now on HBO Max in the US (it's still on Netflix in the UK), they have to pay to keep it there in accordance with all those original contracts. There was that case with Bones a few years back when Fox was found guilty of essentially self-dealing on the licencing fees it charged for the show, letting Hulu get it cheaply and therefore leaving the creatives who were due a share of sales being under-recompensed.

But in more recent times, a streamer usually just buys out the entirety of a show's rights. Netflix owns 100% of Stranger Things for as long as they want it. The various production companies involved got paid at the start (or over 36 months as we recently learned), and that's their lot. Maybe they negotiated some kind of bonus system with Netflix if the show achieves certain goals. Who knows? But in essence, that initial payment is their lot. And this makes a lot of sense for Netflix who needs a catalogue that isn't reliant on shows that might fly to another service if someone writes a cheque big enough. There was a recent report (https://www.ampereanalysis.com/insight/netflix-originals-and-exclusives-now-the-majority-of-its-us-catalogue#:~:text=Under%20current%20growth%20rates%2C%2075,50%25%20threshold%20by%20Q4%202022.) that Netflix Originals and Exclusives (not the same thing!) had reached 50% of their catalogue in the US. Nirvana for them would surely be owning a show like Friends or The Office with upwards of ten seasons, and hundreds of hours, but which they don't have to pay another dime to hang onto. They've not really got that yet - maybe The Ranch was something they hoped might fit the bill? I managed one episode, but they made 80!

Given the way HBO has behaved in the past, for the most part holding on tightly to its shows so that they don't go elsewhere, I'd imagined that they bought out quite a lot of their shows' rights at the start. Yes, The Sopranos and Sex and the City ended up on other channels for periods of time, but you could always get them on HBO/HBO Go/HBO Max/HBO Whatever. And it was HBO's choice to licence them out.  So beyond the actual streaming costs, I'd thought that there would be no additional cost to them serving those shows. But I'm not sure that's true.

Recent events suggest that in many cases, there are fees payable for keeping shows in the HBO Max catalogue - either ongoing licencing fees to hang onto them even when they were HBO/HBO Max shows from the outset, or fees payable to the production studio/creatives/whoever when you stream an episode. Otherwise there'd be no point to removing shows even when they're cancelled. 

I suspect that in truth this is a complex area with some long-term, but perhaps not exclusive deals. Each show might have subtly different rights associated with it. Maybe HBO agreed to pay Martin Scorcese an annual fee to keep Vinyl on the service, just because of who he is. Then, when it's streamed by three people a year or whatever, they decide that fee is no longer worthwhile. 

And things change over time. At the start Netflix just licenced House of Cards. It aired on other channels around the world in territories where Netflix didn't exist at the time. Who knows whether Netflix will at some point lose the rights to it globally?

Anyway, I was just listening to The Vergecast team reading the runes on the fate of the various streaming services. I don't necessarily agree with all their calls, but it's an interesting listen: https://www.theverge.com/the-vergecast

Julia Alexander on the Downstream podcast (and Puck) is also well worth a listen: https://www.relay.fm/downstream


Adam

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PGage

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Dec 15, 2022, 11:39:18 AM12/15/22
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Yeah, it is really complicated, and for all the shade we throw at Zas I do begin to understand that a lot of his decisions make financial sense. 

But it also seems that he does not value the HBO brand accurately. Let’s say Westworld costs him $1M a year to keep on the shelf available for streaming (no idea if that is a wild under or over estimate). Even if it does not generate enough actual hours of viewing to offset the $1M, it seems to me that a number of people subscribe to HBO because it is the kind of place where shows like Westworld are available. I may never watch Euphoria, but it’s existence and buzz probably enhances the subjective value of my HBO subscription. 

Now, Westworld is low hanging fruit in the prestige television genre, and given how far it fell in terms of both substance and perception, I doubt it will have much lasting impact in and of itself. But if it starts happening to shows that still have the bloom on their rose…

There was a time when I spent X number of dollars/year on boxed DVD sets of television shows I liked. As streaming appeared we made a conscious decision to stop buying DVDs, and put that money into streaming. For the most part this has been a good decision, but it becomes less good if I lose confidence that certain programs will be available. I happen to have the Sopranos box set, but if I didn’t, and paid for HBO in part so I could watch Sopranos whenever I felt like it, I would find my HBO/Max/Discovery subscription was a lot less valuable if Sopranos suddenly disappeared; even more so if it then popped up for free on some Discovery-Tubi service. Now perhaps even Zas would never dump Sopranos, but if his decisions with lesser shows erodes confidence that he is committed to the stability of trademark programming, I think he runs the risk of alienating long term subscribers.

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