MEMO TO: CHANNING DUNGEY, CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE, WARNER BROTHERS TELEVISION GROUP
FROM: STEVE LEBLANG, MEDIA CONSULTANT
RE: YOU, TOO CAN #KNOWDRAMA
Hello again, Ms. Dungey. And please allow me to pick the pieces of crow I’ve been having for breakfast out of my teeth. One minute while I turn my head away.
OK, now that that’s out of the way, allow me to attempt to offer apologies, because had any of us besides you and David Zaslav, and perhaps a select number of your current colleagues, knew what THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’s Joe Flint broke to the rest of us yesterday I would have been far less judgmental about his selection of you to head a suite of basic cable networks that had all supposedly done away with scripted television–the purview you’ve overseen for the better part of the last two decades of your career:
For the past couple of years, Warner Bros. Discovery …neglected its flagship TNT cable network as it focused on building its nascent streaming service, betting that a mix of live sports and reruns would satisfy viewers and distributors…(T)he entertainment conglomerate is rethinking its cable-network strategy, a move that comes against the backdrop of losing its highest-profile sports property and a potentially fatal blow to its streaming expansion. The company has begun working on beefing up original programming for its TNT cable network, people familiar with the matter said, which will involve an increase in spending.
TNT has acquired “The Librarians: The Next Chapter,” a sequel to the supernatural adventure series “The Librarians,” which aired on the network for four seasons. The network is also planning to raid the Warner Bros. movie library to reboot several films into made-for-TV movies or series for TNT, the people said. The move marks a return to its roots of sorts for a network whose longtime slogan was “We Know Drama,” before it was abandoned a decade ago.
I assume you know exactly how successful the network was with that strategy, regularly emerging as the highest-rated non-broadcast network, oft times beating them head-to-head in Monday and Sunday night time slots where they regularly programmed originals. You may have been behind a couple of shows you championed that your ABC colleagues tried to mask the hard ratings truth from when they’d fail to even be fourth or fifth among measured networks in those cases.
I only ask because the explanatory paragraph that Flint added on that suggests what you and perhaps your boss see as the secret sauce to that success might have gotten lost in translation after lo so many years:
Shows in the works for 2025 and beyond include what one executive described as “high-adrenaline” dramas that will play well with the channel’s male audience and be a good fit with the network’s sports programming.
And THE ANKLER’s Sean McNulty didn’t dim down my concern when he added a coupla more details in his newsletter yesterday as well:
Essentially, it sounds like WBD is looking to do the basic cable equivalent of what AMAZON has done with #DadTV — it’s looking for “high adrenaline” dramas to complement the sports still on the network (MLB & NHL mainly, and however you view AEW).
I kinda wish you’d had taken the time to at least rummage through the files on one of the computers in storage (assuming your boss hasn’t yet sold all of them for parts), or at the very least picked some of the brains of those who actually built that slogan into a sustaining business. Because, like me, you might have been a tad surprised to learn that contrary to convention wisdom that would see TNT heavy up on upfront-adjacent promotion and premieres during big-ticket events like the NBA Conference Finals each spring, the audience that drove those successes was, if anything, more like #MomandPopTV. And considering Amazon is destined to inherit the very franchise that supported that strategy, it’s all the less relevant to your task right now.
As a competitor to TNT who worked for someone you know quite well that was obsessed with why they were doing as well as Nielsen said they were, someone at least open to being convinced it wasn’t quite the paid-for consipiracy that he often demanded I napalm their Oldsmar, Florida headquarters in retalliation for, my team and I delved deeply into the demographics and duplications between the content each top-tier cable network was producing and the overlap(s) between them. We got our first clues when we looked at monthly cumes and saw a noticeable spike for TNT during those NBA playoff months, levels often in the high 30 per cent range of all adults would rise to well over 40 per cent. But then once June and July would roll around, they’d dip right back down to levels akin to those of its regular season games. Surprise, surprise, a large proportion of the men that would come in to the tent and watch those promos chose not to become regular series viewers. We saw that those incremental sports viewers chose to watch other sports elsewhere instead. I’d suspect there are a few such studies somewhere in your bosses’ inbox that verify that’s still the case, unless they’ve already been subpoenaed because of their relevance to the Fubu-Venu lawsuit.
And our conclusions from those deep quantitative dives were capproved and corroborated by none other than one of TNT’s head program researchers who I had the chance to interview when she was unceremoniously let go in a cost-savings measure that coincided with a particularly dry spell at FX. When I remarked to my colleagues and superiors that I had such a candidate for an open position, I was collectively urged to pick her brain clean if possible about anything they may have been doing that we should be aware of. Fortunately, this person was in a particularly dishy mood, as her settlement was about to run out. What was confirmed is that every single new original they were considering greenlighting was given the same custom questionnaire when they were testing concept, execution and promotion. What other shows and networks were they regularly watching, and could they accurately identify the shows and the networks they claimed to be fans of. Every qualitative study delivered cuts against those market breaks, and they spent enough to assure there was adequate sample size to make sure those results were legitimate.
And what they continued to find was that the #WeKnowDrama viewer was watching more originals on Lifetime, AMC and USA than they were on FX or HBO. And that was also true of the men who fit those common viewership definitions as much as the women, though those cells were often demographically balanced to reflect the gender split of their more successful shows. Which considering that its flagship series during this era was THE CLOSER, immediately followed by its equally successful spin-off, MAJOR CRIMES, it shouldn’t be surprising that those cells were at least 60 per cent female, and often closer to 2/3 and 3/4.
So while you’re sifting through the choices at your disposal, it might be worth a refresher course for the kinds of success stories that have worked for TNT. Diving back in the CLOSER-verse, considering it’s your IP, is a great place to start. But you might also want to revisit the world of RIZZOLI AND ISLES as well. Their reruns happen to be doing quite well lately for Lifetime.
If you’re open to outside suppliers, I have little doubt the ladies at Sony would be more than happy to walk you through the successes of FRANKLIN AND BASH, which had a decent four-year run on TNT at the same time that SUITS became a tentpole for USA. There was quite a bit of common audience between those two shows. And we all know there’s even more of an audience for SUITS these days than there was then. If that’s a little TOO male, they have another “funny legal” success story in DROP DEAD DIVA as well. That had a five-year run on Lifetime of its own. And Sony is still selling it, as well as format rights, around the world, most recently in the Asia-Pacific region. You could probably make a sweetheart deal on that factor alone.
Look, contrary to first blush opinions, I actually think you can make a run of this, at least on the ratings and branding front. After all, your bar’s far lower now, and once the NBA indeed leaves (sorry, Yosemite, the NBA filed late yesterday to dismiss your suit entirely, so despite your bravado you’re a LONG way from getting back in their good graces) it’ll be even lower. Do remember your opportunity is being forged by this need for something worth discussing with the operators that will determine TNT’s longterm existence, as Flint also reminded in his piece:
TNT’s deals with Comcast and Charter Communications, two of the biggest cable distributors, will come up for renewal in the next few years. How those talks go will have a significant effect on the channel’s future.
Distributors have shown a growing willingness to play hardball with programmers that, just like Warner Bros. Discovery, have been starving their networks of fresh programming and reserving their highest-profile content for their own streaming platforms.
And forget me. You’ve got far snarkier observers out there to convince. For one, McNulty threw in his own one and one-half cents in his reporting:
TNT has to find a new way to justify that $3 a month affiliate fee it gets from cable operators, and there are 2 ways to do that — one of which ain’t lookin’ great:
Renew NBA- Invest in well-promoted original scripted programming
- Unscripted programming won’t cut it for the $3 a month ask.
The problem being . . . this tactic is very 2000s and 2010s cable business thinking. Just ask AMC NETWORKS, which has never veered from strategy #2 and is still seeing great declines.
For the 127th time — cable TV companies just DGAF about this stuff anymore. And given the likelihood that all of these new TNT series will be available to stream on MAX anyway . . . who can blame them.
Perhaps more of a doubting Thomas–or Ken, to be precise–viewpoint-came from the one offered yesterday afternoon that DEADLINE’s dynamic duo of Dominic Patten and Anthony D’Alessandro dropped late late night:
Linear TV advertising and original production are falling fast, and don’t expect sports to save the industry, Ken Ziffren said today.
“On the whole, the combination of online and social media viewing, on the revenue front will not increase consumer spend,” the famously circumspect Ziffren Brittenham LLP co-founder warned the Beverly Hills Bar Association in his annual lecture Friday. “I don’t know if we can reverse these trends, that we can bring them back to ancient 2020 situations where we had consumer spend and entertainment spend on a growth greater than the CPI both here and around the world.”
Citing several studies examining the steady fall in linear TV advertising and the drop in original productions from streamers, Ziffren’s remarks Friday have a potential Nixon goes to China blast radius because of his long history in the industry and his prestige.
So yep, Channing, you’ve got your work cut out for you to be sure.
I offer you this free, unsolicited advice in the hopes it might spark enough interest for you to at least ask around to see where those old #WeKnowDrama files might be housed, or at least want to the pick the brains of us who happen to know their contents, as I was encouraged to when my bosses challenged me to deliver something they believed they needed as much as yours do the turnaround they’ve tasked you to make.
But from this point forward, if you do want more help, it’ll cost you. But I do promise you it’ll be a fraction of what anyone from the NBA has asked from your company lately.
Until next time…