Sony TV studios chief blames performance obsession for ‘untenable’ series delays

Sony Pictures Television (SPT) studios chief Katherine Pope has blasted the “absolutely untenable” delays between series commissions, warning the obsession over performance could jeopardise audience relationships.

Speaking at MIA (Mercato Internazionale Audiovisivo) in Rome today (16 October), Pope said SPT is tightly focused on cutting down on delays between episodes, and blamed the gap between series on “data-driven buyers”, waiting to see how a show performed before committing to a greenlight.

“It is so frustrating… those long delays are just absolutely untenable and they are not fair to the fans,” she said. “I’ll sit down with my husband and we’ll be like, ‘OK, what happened last season?’.

“We [at SPT] come at this as fans first and foremost, and that experience of watching eight eps then two years later getting another eight is just not good.

“We can’t afford in such a saturated world to lose fans. It is hard enough to get them – God forbid we lose them.”

Pope described the current squeeze as a “hangover from the boom times” and added the return to “the old system” of discipline in producing for broadcast networks is welcome, and delivering a “healthy rigour” to the industry.

“There was a sense of time and money in the US broadcast system, you had to get these shows done because they had a time when it had to go out and a number that you couldn’t go over,” she said.

“Now we are seeing the hangover of the boom, people are saying: ‘I don’t know if we can do it for that money or on that time scale’, but we have to and we’re seeing some of that rigour from the old system coming back. That is really healthy.”

Dialling down delays

Pope took up the top job at SPT Studios in 2022 and shepherds shows ranging from The Boys for Prime Video and Apple TV+’s For All Mankind to The Last Of Us for HBO and Cobra Kai on Netflix.

Her current slate includes the fifth and final series of The Boys and upcoming Nicolas Cage-starring drama Spider-Noir.

Despite such high-end and talent-laden series, Pope – a former head of originals at Charter Communications’ Spectrum – said her focus remained on characters, adding that discussions around “budget friction” were a good thing that “always yields unexpected answers”.

“Perhaps it is where and how long you’re going to shoot, often in that friction there’ll be something nobody has heard or thought of.

“It’s not about having endless time and money. TV is about character, not spectacle. I love spectacle – Game Of Thrones is up there in my top five – but the reason I love it is the relationships even though the special effects are cool.”

Pope used her appearance in Rome to talk up SPT’s position as the so-called arms dealer in streaming - the Japan-based firm eschewed launching its own global SVoD platform in favour of focusing on producing - and said it was well-placed to take create shows that pushed boundaries.

Some studios’ in-house production divisions were able to “paint by numbers to some extent”, Pope said, adding that SPT urged its creators to take risks during what she admitted had been “super volatile times”.

“What [in-house] can’t do is the show they haven’t thought of and the show they’ll never think of - it’s the thing that scares them,” she said. “But for us, it’s the [show] where they think I have to have it because I can’t let anyone else have it. We don’t have a content filter.”

Pope is now looking to take “the artistry from the past eight years” while balancing budgets to “keep the quality up and to help those shows to keep coming back.

She added: “We don’t want three years between series that cost £100m each - we want to allow the viewer to continue connecting with the series.”