After the end of the flashy Peak TV era, Kevin Beggs, Lionsgate Television Group chair and chief creative officer, sees green shoots signaling a hopeful recovery for the global TV business.
“The streaming wars kind of came to a crashing end, both with COVID and the strikes, and now there’s been a nice little resurgence that’s happening, but nothing of the order of what we saw,” Beggs on Tuesday told the Access Canada Summit in Toronto presented by The Hollywood Reporter.
To take advantage of better times, Beggs argued Lionsgate TV needs to take disciplined bets on new series, like the first-look deal the studio signed with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures.
“It’s really yielded a great result,” he added about The Studio on Apple TV+ during a conversation with Maer Roshan, Editor-in-Chief of THR at the Omni King Edward Hotel, midway through the Toronto Film Festival.
Beggs welcomed Apple TV+ renewing the comedy for a second season, with Rogen returning as Matt Remick, a movie executive who is elevated to president of the fictional Continental Studios and who quickly realizes he might be in over his head.
At the same time, Beggs said he and his TV division are wary about inspiring any characters or storyline in the fictional series as it returns. “The mantra around our shop, and also probably to an extent Apple, is we don’t want to be in season two,” he insisted.
Beggs, a California native who has been with Lionsgate Television for around 25 years, argued that, despite unprecedented change and turmoil in the TV industry, emerging and enterprising creators will always find a way into the business.
“These disruptive moments, these dips, I’ve lived through a bunch of them, and these times also present opportunity. It won’t present itself in the traditional ways,” he argued. As the major studios and network cut back, new entry points into the business will come from what is “bubbling up” in a next-generation creator economy.
“All of it revolves around great storytelling at its root; all of us are here because we love stories. We want to tell them. We want to be part of telling them. We want to support artists that tell them better than we do,” Beggs added.
For Lionsgate TV, hitting a bull’s eye in the TV still takes hunches, and not just data, but increasingly informed hunches. “Everyone who has ever pronounced the death of a genre has been surprised by a hit. You can’t anticipate what won’t work. You have to think, will it work? And why are we uniquely qualified for this package, the writer, creator, the show runner, the team to deliver it in a way that is unique and new,” Beggs argued.
And despite the supremacy of streaming platforms, Beggs is still bullish on legacy broadcast networks. “Shows have to be self-contained enough that they’re repeatable,” he insisted, unlike soaps that are more difficult as reruns.
“Standalone episodes with some serialization is kind of the key. Procedurals are probably the best model right now,” Beggs said.
Lionsgate TV has a hit on CBS with Ghosts, and now that David Ellison has completed Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount Global, Beggs is bullish about working with CBS under its new leadership.
“Anybody who’s bolstering a legacy media company, putting investments in making more stuff, that’s an amazing thing. It could have easily gone the other way,” Beggs said of working with Ellison and his new team.
The Access Canada Summit wraps on Wednesday, ahead of the Toronto Film Festival reaching a finale on Sept. 14.