Allison Corn and Stan Hsue from Lion US discuss the All3Media-owned prodco’s Cash At Your Door, produced for E!, as well as the company’s direction of travel following CEO Tony Tackaberry’s exit in January.

Cash At Your Door started out as an Israeli format

Following Tony Tackaberry’s departure in January, you guys have been running Lion US. In what direction is the company travelling now?
Corn: Stan and I have been at Lion for more than 15 years, splitting the responsibility of day-to-day production, which I oversee, and development with Stan. We were really well poised to step in after Tony left. It has felt like a natural evolution and an exciting time for us to have the opportunity while at the same time we’ve missed Tony personally and professionally.

Hsue: We all miss Tony’s presence at Lion and we’re pleased we’re still collaborating with him on quite a few projects. That said, Allison and I are excited to build on Lion’s past success while also moving in new directions. One thing that’s top of mind is that very few production companies are led by women or people of colour, so Allison and I are very excited to play our small role in reversing that trend. We’re prioritising projects and talent that prioritise diverse voices and tell stories that aren’t often heard. That’s guiding our thinking across all genres.

Cash At Your Door, which was originally an Israeli format but is known in the US as a segment on Ellen, is being rebooted by you for E!. Give us the background to that deal.
Hsue: We got to know the format a while back. As the long-time producers of Cash Cab we always have a keen interest in gameshow formats, especially ambush gameshows and especially in unexpected settings. As soon as we saw Cash At Your Door we knew we were interested. We loved its simplicity and on top of that this amazing opportunity to snoop around contestants’ homes. We felt we got to know the contestants in a way you never would in a studio format. We pitched it a few years back and as part of that process the producers at Ellen caught wind of the format and we were thrilled when it featured there as one of her segments. It was so well received it convinced us more than ever it was perfect for a US audience. We had such a positive experience rebooting Cash Cab for Bravo and we knew right away we wanted to bring Cash At Your Door to the team at NBCUniversal [NBCU].

Allison Corn

Corn: The key ingredient to the show is it’s an ambush mixed up with a home show and a talkshow, so finding a host who can do all of those things is tough. I think we’ve all seen what’s going on with Jeopardy! at the moment. It’s not easy to host a gameshow and find the right host for it. You have to make it look easy – that’s a big piece of it. Jason Biggs was on our early list and we really loved him for it, as did the network. We reached out, he responded quickly. He saw why he was a great match for it; he’s good at improv comedy and that’s a big part of the show, being quick on your feet. He’s also good at putting people at ease and talking to real people. This was the beginning of 2020 and his schedule was a challenge but we tried to cut a deal, then Covid-19 hit and we pushed ahead. The silver lining of Covid-19 was unscripted came back much sooner than scripted did and he became available to us much more than he maybe otherwise would have been.

How do you go about taking a small segment from a big show and grow it into a show in its own right?
Corn: There are two things that are really important, one was the right host and making sure the ambush moment felt really big. We worked hard on that. The other thing that our partners at NBCU were really on board with – which is great because it’s their money – was raising the stakes up to a US$25k jackpot. We have contestants who have lost their job and are struggling and we’re going into their homes, so we felt that really supersized it and made it feel like it belongs in primetime as its own show and is worth the viewers’ time.

Production in lockdown was tough enough. How do you go about staging surprise ambushes when you have all these testing and quarantine protocols?
Corn: All productions have been a challenge in Covid-19 times and this in particular, going into people’s homes who are not professional actors or professional television people. They had to be tested to allow for people not to have masks on, Jason to not have a mask, everybody be in the house together. That meant what we wanted to do – show up unannounced – we couldn’t do. So we were very announced. In the pilot, people had to test and quarantine and although that got better over time people still needed a PCR test and then a rapid test the day of filming, so there was no way to pretend we weren’t showing up.

Without getting into the details too much, people thought something totally different was happening. We tweaked it every day for the first couple of weeks based on what worked and what didn’t. The surprise has to be genuine. It helped to have Jason there because they didn’t know anything about any talent being involved and then had to open their door and see Jason Biggs. That’s a great moment; it got us out of problems we would have had a much tougher time solving. We would also do things like show up earlier, just to try and catch people off guard, while still having a nurse stick a Q-Tip up their nose.

Will that continue in the same way if the show is renewed, or will you go back to the show you originally wanted to make?
Corm: It’s hard to imagine the Covid-free world. In success we found with Cash if they hear ‘Lion Television’ and ‘we want to meet you on the street’ they Google something and they come to Cash Cab quickly. With this if people come to know Cash At Your Door, they think something weird is happening, they hear Lion Television, we’re done. We will have to be more careful about our ruse, not repeat stuff from the past. My ideal is they think a casting producer is showing up for something very different. Yes, we would love to get back to that. We all want to go back to Covid-free production the sooner the better, but the most important thing is everybody is safe and we don’t run into quarantines, shutdowns, people testing positive.

Stan Hsue

Cash Cab was a reboot, this is originally an Israeli show, is this the strategy in future or do you have original format ambitions?
Hsue: Stepping back a bit, formats are certainly a huge part of our strategy. We concentrate on three areas. The first is true crime, formats is second and we’re also eager to pursue premium docs. As the long-time producers of Cash Cab, formats are part of our DNA. We’re working on another ambush gameshow now, partnering with a brilliant producer on it, so we’re taking that out to market as well as a few competition and relationship formats. In terms of originals versus partnering with existing IP, we always want to do both. We’re always looking for formats we can adapt for a US audience and that’s what we did with Cash Cab and Cash At Your Door, so we’re always in the market for that.

Getting original formats away as opposed to proven IP was difficult enough pre-pandemic. Has it exacerbated that problem?
Hsue: It was already very hard to launch an original format. It is a little bit harder now. We have found over the past year we have had a couple of really big, noisy ideas that networks have been interested in, so it’s all about the strength of the idea, as long as it can cut through the clutter. You are right though, it is more challenging to launch an original format.

Corn: You can see from what’s on TV that if it’s an original format, having talent that can launch it really helps.

You mentioned diversity earlier. How will that manifest in practical terms?
Hsue: It is something that will guide us in so many ways in terms of creative choice, staffing and the talent we work with. It’s going to guide us in terms of producers we might partner with and the types of projects we want to choose, particularly in premium docs. It’s something we want to keep in mind with staffing. Having a diverse staff will absolutely make a better end product

Corn: TV in general is about who you know. You hire who you know and that has a way of being a self-fulfilling prophecy. I went to Syracuse, I see that on the resume… It’s about pushing yourself and doing the work at our end so when we’re doing research into who’s out there and available we’re doing that through different channels to get different results. It’s also about identifying young talent, cultivating those people and being really deliberate in who you invest time and resources. In general ,we’re having staffing issues, diversity or otherwise, as everybody is at the moment.