“There’s a degree of creativity and freedom that exists in this day and age that is just phenomenal because with these platforms, content is monetized in a different way,” Walt Disney Television’s Dana Walden says of the business model for streaming.
, knew she had an enormous job to integrate two studios — 20th Television and what was then ABC Studios — in addition to steering ABC Entertainment and adding Hulu Originals soon after she started. And she knew she had to breathe new life into the young-adult-targeted Freeform at a time when linear basic cable channels face extinction.
“It’s the most competitive time in the history of our business — it’s ridiculously competitive,” Walden observes. “It’s just a phenomenal time to be in the content business.” For Walden, an executive who devoted most of her career to developing and programming for broadcast television, the creative freedom offered by streaming and direct-to-consumer business models is “exhilarating,” she says. “It’s almost as if any great idea a creator comes up with now, there’s a place for it in the streaming universe.
For Walden and Rice, the industry scrutiny that’s come closer to home after the October 2020 restructuring has been a challenge to manage through. The disruption led to some high-level executive departures and sowed confusion among outsiders about who had the power to make decisions and greenlights. Time and success have helped quiet those questions as Walden’s world has begun to hum with buzzy shows.
In creating a centralized structure for content production and distribution governed by a single P&L statement, the company’s financial accounting and the business motivations of executive leaders are more easily aligned. “We essentially used to be in the wholesale business. We made content and we marketed content to 200 affiliates in the broadcast world or delivered it to Charter or Sky. We didn’t have an individual relationship with each customer,” Rice tells Variety.
The suddenness of the change in October 2020 marked Chapek’s first major stamp on the company that he inherited eight months earlier on the eve of the pandemic. Tara Duncan, president of Freeform and Onyx, was working as a producer at Netflix and Hulu before she was recruited to lead Freeform in spring 2020. A year later, she was tapped to create the Onyx Collective content brand.
By many accounts, one of Walden’s great strengths is her ability to form meaningful bonds with talent in a way that helps them do their best work — and sometimes far better work than they thought possible. And she excels at creating and steering a team structure that works to support writers, actors, producers and directors in fundamental ways that go beyond the set.
Murphy will not address the speculation that he aims to reunite with Walden in her Disney realm when his contract expires next year. The two still work closely together on Murphy-produced series for FX and 20th Television. “It was a real come-to-Jesus with me,” Meriwether recalls. “She said, ‘You need to be a showrunner. Step into that role, and don’t be a young woman who doesn’t know what to do.’”
“As opposed to the studio having expectations and telling you what they’d like you to do, there’s a little bit more of ‘What are you interested in? We have these different platforms. Is there anything you’re interested in that could fit them?’” Meriwether says. “Which I’ve been so happy about because I was definitely ready to do something besides network comedy.”
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