Future Shack's Wachtel keeps an eye on the blue skies

Jeff Wachtel, who was a key architect of USA Network’s legendary ‘blue sky’ programming era, discusses his new company’s content strategy, streamers’ growing appetite for procedurals and how the aggressive shift from linear to streaming has prematurely diminished still-valuable US cable brands.

The international television business has done a 180-degree turn in the two years since Jeff Wachtel, the former president of USA Network, UCP and NBCUniversal’s international division, launched his independent production company Future Shack.

An abrupt and sweeping commissioning downturn, dual Hollywood strikes and a sustained advertising slump are, of course, not ideal factors as a new company attempts to find its feet.

But the bursting of the ‘Peak TV’ bubble, and the ensuing shift from mega-budgeted dramas towards returnable, lighter fare that can be produced for less, has created newfound opportunities for independent operators with the ability to cobble together financing from various sources, and those with a knack for creating broad-based TV hits.

Over the course of his career, Wachtel has proven adept at both. During his time at USA Network (2001-2014), he was one of the key architects of the network’s ‘blue sky’ era, which was marked by character-driven, light and fun dramas, including In Plain Sight, Royal Pains, White Collar, Burn Notice, Necessary Roughness, Covert Affairs, Fairly Legal, Graceland and Suits – a string of hits that helped make USA the country’s most-watched cable entertainment net for 14 consecutive years.

He also ran NBCUniversal’s international studio in London for three years, helping to get shows including We Are Lady Parts off the ground.

As the commissioning appetite from streamers shifts to prioritise slightly lighter-hearted fare that will appeal to advertisers, Wachtel’s perspective is an interesting one. So what has he made of the shift?

“It’s been nice to see the pendulum start to swing back,” he tells C21. “It swung strongly away from lighter, procedural, longer-running shows – nobody wanted them for five years, maybe longer – and now it’s starting to swing back.”

Legal drama Suits became the posterchild of the return to episodic drama after it dominated streaming viewership in the US in the summer of 2023, becoming the year’s most-watched show.

“What was fun for us was that the example that cracked that moment was Suits,” says Wachtel. “It was so spectacularly successful on Netflix that it shifted the way people throughout the industry thought about that notion, and then they started to think that when they do a gigantic six, 10 episode shows – no matter how good it is – it’s over and you have to show up tomorrow and invent it all over again.”

From the audience side too, Wachtel believes there was a desire to engage with escapist shows that aren’t too dark or emotionally draining featuring characters and stories that viewers have “learned to love over time.”

Wachtel also argues you need look no further than the personnel at the top of the major streaming services to see why the commissioning shift is beginning to filter through the SVoD platforms.

“Think about the people who are running the primary streamers right now. Bela Bajaria [chief content officer] at Netflix, Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg [co-heads of video programming] at Apple TV+ and Jennifer Salke [head of Amazon and MGM Studios] at Amazon. These are all people who were brought up in the broadcast world, and often as sellers,” he says.

Wachtel has worked with Bajaria on various occasions, including when she was a seller at CBS Studios and he was a buyer at USA Network, and Erlicht and Van Amburg during their time running Sony Pictures Television. Salke is the former entertainment president at NBC and before that VP of creative affairs at 20th Century Fox, where she packaged shows including family drama juggernaut This Is Us (NBC).

“Even the highest end of the streamers are managed by programmers who want the big, noisy, extraordinary Brad Pitt and George Clooney [project] in a fun romp, but they also understand that there’s another place that they need to lean on.”

He cites Netflix’s political thriller The Diplomat as a series that previously would have found a home on broadcast television. “On some level, 10 years ago it would’ve been on [US broadcaster] ABC. They wouldn’t have spent as much money, and I’m not sure they would’ve got Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell, but that type of thing. I think [the streamers] are leaning in that direction,” he says.

Against this backdrop, Wachtel is building out a three-pronged content strategy at Future Shack, which he launched alongside chief operating officer Sam Michaels and chief financial officer Yusik Choi.

One piece of the strategy sees Future Shack going after what Wachtel dubs “very high-end IP,” including its in-development adaptation of Orson Scott Card science-fiction novel Ender’s Game with Gigi Pritzker’s media company Madison Wells. Given the amount of time it takes to develop and package such projects, Wachtel acknowledges it will likely only do two or three of these projects.

The second piece of the content strategy is what Wachtel refers to as the “middle range,” where the Future Shack team will work with good writers with good ideas to develop projects and package them from the ground up. “I believe that television is still a writer-driven medium,” he says.

The third aspect of Future Shack’s strategy is coproduction, though Wachtel says he feels the term has been overused to the point that it has lost its true meaning.

“The reason I don’t like to use the word coproduction is people have been bandying that term around for 30 years and mostly it means a show that doesn’t know what it wants to be with people using accents that range somewhere between Iceland and Boston, and you don’t really know what it is,” he says.

Future Shack is working on “specific coproductions,” argues Wachtel, “which are dictated by the economics and the jigsaw puzzle of finding several markets each of which value the show as if it were their own.”

Its first major copro ordered to series was Good Cop/Bad Cop for The CW, Roku and Australian streamer Stan, about a brother-and-sister detective team in a small-town US police force.

As with much of USA Network’s output during the ‘blue sky’ era, the show finds comedy within the drama. He describes Good Cop/Bad Cop as a “comedy with a dead body” in a similar vein to older USA Network shows like Psyche, White Collar and Suits that had a “lightness of purpose.”

Future Shack is also employing a cross-border US-Canada copro strategy with its drama Murder in a Small Town for US broadcaster Fox and Corus-owned Canadian broadcaster Global. The series is adapted from LR Wright’s series of mystery novels about a detective who moves to the Pacific Northwest in search of peace but soon finds the quiet coastal town has more than its share of secrets. The show debuts on Fox and Global on September 24.

Both Good Cop/Bad Cop and Murder in a Small Town are distributed by ITV Studios.

Although scripted is the company’s primary focus, it is looking at some unscripted and kids programming, says Wachtel, adding that the world of manga would also be a “fun place to source some things.”

C21 also spoke with Wachtel about his perspective on the decline of the cable business, typified by last month’s news that both Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount Global were writing down the value of their cable network businesses by US$9.1bn and US$6bn respectively.

Wachtel, who spent the majority of his career in the world of cable television, says he has been “disappointed” to see some “spectacular” cable assets relegated in importance in the midst of the streaming wars.

“I’m a little sad that a number of basic cable networks, in particular, abandoned the model of ‘if we make a few fantastic shows, people are going to come and find it.’ It seems like they dumped out faster than maybe they needed to. I think there was a more graceful way to manage that,” he says.

He praises Disney-owned FX for continuing to push the envelope for cable and pay TV networks, calling the channel the “class of the field.”

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that FX’s tagline is ‘Fearless,’ because that’s a big part of what’s missing right now in the industry – a sense of [accepting that] failure is built into the system and you can’t succeed unless you’re risking failure. FX has been a leader in that. They say: we’re going to do it, we love the writer, love this idea – let’s go.”

Wachtel urges all executives commissioning content to endeavour to push their own confines. “You always have to be pushing outside your comfort zone. When people start to feel they shouldn’t take risks and should stay inside the narrow confines, that’s the beginning of the end.”

As well as the aforementioned greenlights, Future Shack will spend the coming 12-to-24 months focused on growing the three prongs of its content strategy. In addition to its focus on coproduction, that means “finding brilliant, unique voices that say something relatable,” says Wachtel, and sourcing upper-tier IP like the case of Ender’s Game.

The company has also continued to build out its team, most recently hiring Frances Manfredi, formerly the president of content acquisitions and strategy at US streamer Peacock, as partner and head of distribution and content strategy. Manfredi is focused on making Future Shack an “industry leader in pulling the different pieces together so that shows are truly global.”

“Global content can be really big and appeal to everyone,” says Wachtel, “but sometimes global content can be Fauda or Casa de Papel or The End of the F***ing World or We Are Lady Parts – which couldn’t be more specific but it’s really about something that everyone understands.”

While Wachtel may no longer be working inside a studio behemoth, he says the advantages of being independent in an increasingly vertically integrated industry are many.

“We have a disadvantage in that we’re not a multi-billion-dollar company, but we have an advantage in that we are flexible,” he says. “And in a world experiencing significant vertical integration, where everything seems to be moving towards a future of four, five maybe six major entities, it would be smart to be a little speed boat zipping in between those mega companies.”