NEW YORK - Kevin Williamson, noted chronicler of Pacey, Joey and the rest of the Capeside gang, recently had an epiphany about his relationship with broadcast television.
"I was doing a lot of network and getting burned out on it," says Williamson, who two decades ago created the landmark millennial hit Dawson's Creek on the WB and made a half-dozen other broadcast series since. "I wanted something that was streaming and premium."
The creator got what he wished for -- sort of.
Williamson's new show, Tell Me a Story, premiered recently on a CBS platform. But it's not on CBS, that massively mainstream network of CSI and The Big Bang Theory. And it lands far from the conventional bull's-eye of those series.
Tell me a Story puts a dark, modern spin on classic fairy-tales, telling three parallel genre-inflected stories about young people in crisis. Built into the glossy show is a heavily serialized component -- and plenty of drugs and sex. Mark Harmon solving naval crimes on NCIS, it isn't.
Williamson's new show will play exclusively on a digital service called CBS All Access. The platform is a unique creature, a product of the country's most old-school -- and old-skewing -- broadcaster, trying to beat Netflix at its own game.
Launched in 2014 but increasing its original programming in recent months, All Access seeks to walk a slippery line between mainstream network and premium-subscription television. The service offers perhaps the best chance for CBS to target the young viewers who have largely avoided the network. (CBS' median-viewer age is nearly 60, the oldest of any of the broadcast networks.)
It also could turn into a tweener jumble that undercuts CBS' traditional brand without making inroads for a new audience, leaving the company spending lots of money on programming for a streaming service to which nobody subscribes.
This is hardly an idle experiment. At stake in All Access is not just one company's model but also the fate of streaming itself -- whether it can be not just for the disrupters but also for the traditionalists, whether the future of television will be with those who've dominated it in the past.
If All Access can build a critical mass of subscribers, it will demonstrate that legacy networks have found their way in the 21st century.
And if not? It could further reinforce the theory of a radical new era in television, one in which major broadcasters have been wholly replaced by upstart entities with direct ties to consumers, with little chance of ever turning back the clock.
All Access currently claims 2.5 million subscribers and aims for 4 million by next year. That number is impressive, analysts say, given how most Americans are not accustomed to paying extra for CBS-branded content. But experts also note the figure's paltriness relative to competitors. Netflix, for instance, has more than 115 million subscribers globally.
As a digital venture with deep pockets, All Access offers what executives describe as the best of both worlds: the muscle and know-how of a broadcaster with the creative risk-taking of a streamer.
But its hybrid nature has also yielded plenty of naysaying. Skeptics -- they include some who've worked with the company -- ask whether All Access can create enough of a cool factor to attract paying subscribers, especially while tethered to a corporate structure, and brand, known for a traditional model of commercial viewership.
CBS a decade ago chose to sit out Hulu, the digital venture of four other entertainment companies, because then-chief executive Leslie Moonves was worried about cannibalizing profits from the business, according to a person familiar with discussions who was not authorized to talk about them publicly. (Because its total-viewership numbers have eclipsed competitors for nearly two decades, CBS has had both a more lucrative business than its competitors and is more dependent on traditional advertising.)
But that conservatism ended up having a weirdly cutting-edge effect. When streaming finally became more popular, CBS had to build a service strong enough to stand independently. All Access launched with a bevy of library titles -- Cheers and Cagney & Lacey, MacGyver and Perry Mason. For a monthly fee of $5.99 (with ads) or $9.99 (ad-free) consumers could have access to these shows as well as news, NFL games and the Grammys. Executives soon added original series -- the red meat of subscription services -- to attract subscribers.
The service currently has seven original series, including Star Trek: Discovery, the Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight and Story, as well as rocketry origin tale Strange Angel and a karmic mystery named One Dollar. In development are at least two other Trek series, including one with Patrick Stewart, the original Jean-Luc Picard; the idea is to flog that franchise in the way Disney does Marvel.
One of All Access' biggest bets is a Jordan Peele-overseen reboot of the Twilight Zone, scheduled for the first half of next year, it hopes will improve its cool factor.
For now, though, it's all about Story.
Style on 11/13/2018