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 A Member Profile by Chris Davison, chris@lthmedia.com
David Brownfield is Senior Vice President, Current Programming for CBS Entertainment. David began his career in television sports and has since worked in many areas of the business, from local to studio to network. I recently had a chance to speak with David to discuss CSI, audiences and online enhancements.
Q: Can you tell us about your background and what made you want to work in entertainment? How did you get involved with the HRTS?
-I spent my first five years post-college working in local television, producing the pre-game show for the Los Angeles Lakers on KCAL-TV. After that, with help of several friends, I made the transition to series television, working for three years as a junior executive at Paramount Network Television. It was at Paramount where I became familiar with HRTS and attended the first of many luncheons and events.
Q: What are some of the factors that make CSI so consistently compelling?
-the writers do a wonderful job of creating compelling stories and quirky mysteries that quickly hook viewers and allow them to play along as our characters solve a puzzle every week. That’s been a winning formula since the beginning and continues to work with the show now, amazingly, in its 10th season.
I think viewers have also come to view our team as an extended family, with each character very well defined, both as individuals and within the team. Then, there’s the now infamous CSI science/forensic sequences, which are always delivered with a distinct and clever visual style illuminating the twists in the cases. Further, CSI has far more emotion and heart than people think. The producers go to great lengths to show that no matter how many dead bodies our CSIs discover, there are always cases that touch them on a personal level.
Q: What do you look for when considering or developing new material?
-most important is the writer creating the show. We’ve been lucky enough to work with some really talented people who have charted their careers the right way, working their way up the staffs of successful shows. Second, we try to look at a series idea and ask ourselves if the story engine driving the show is strong enough to sustain multiple seasons. We currently have a dozen series in their fifth season or beyond. Thus, we try to learn from our successes, looking at a series concept and whether it will sustain a show (and audience) well into the future. I think that’s part of the reason we have as many successful crime shows as we do. Our various teams of investigators don’t have to chase down stories… they show up right in their backyards.
Q: What are your thoughts on product integration and branded entertainment in general?
-when it comes to scripted television, the priority is not forcing an integration into storylines so producers feel creatively compromised or the audience feels manipulated. We’ve had a fair amount of success doing this with our comedies, carrying out an integration in a subtle way. Also, many producers are becoming more accepting of product integration done in a tasteful way. They understand we’re all dealing with an audience with more viewing options than ever, in addition to increased DVR penetration.
In addition, advertisers and their clients seem more willing to work with producers so their products are cleverly worked into existing stories, rather than artificially building entire new scenes around them. And, the fact that we plan these integrations several months in advance gives us time to get the producers and the clients on the same page from the beginning.
Q: As the industry has evolved digitally how has that changed your job?
-as many of our series are gaining a much bigger presence on line, we’re constantly thinking about what we can do to enhance viewers’ experiences outside weekly on-air storylines. With the help of our digital group, we’ve come up with ways to make many of our show sites more interactive. These changes can take the form of polling viewers for their favorite moments in a show’s history to asking them to pick favorite villains who’ve escaped capture and might turn up again down the road. Recently, we’ve also done well on several series with character blogs, revealing secrets viewers won’t get from watching the shows on-air. Finally, on Ghost Whisperer, we’ve produced several seasons of an on-line series which runs parallel to the show on-air, with cross-over elements as well.
Q: How do you see the industry changing over the next few years?
-I think the balance between serialized and closed-ended dramas will remain relatively the same. However, viewer fragmentation will make serialized shows more challenging than ever, not to mention the difficulty creating and maintaining a strong mythology that has ratings legs for more than a couple seasons. I hope comedy series continue their upswing, so that each network has at least 4-5 series they can be proud of. Finally, I think it’s inevitable we’ll see one, (if not several) online concepts or short series successfully cross-over to become network hits. There’s so much incredibly creative work being done on the digital front that I fully expect both cable and broadcast networks to continue looking for ways to bring it into their folds.
Q: Anything you would like to add?
-I feel CBS is incredibly fortunate to have an extremely talented group of showrunners who, season after season deliver original stories and great character arcs for our series regulars. These producers fully understand how important it is to maintain the trust they’ve built with their core audiences while at the same time keeping their series fresh with surprising twists, big dramatic moments and the right amount of humor along the way.
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