Star of Insecure continues to be Rae of light for audiences

CBS plans to replace ‘Big’

LOS ANGELES, Dec 5, (RTRS): There are some who say Issa Rae videos should come with a warning label: Her work, particularly her groundbreaking YouTube web series “Awkward Black Girl” and award-winning HBO TV series “Insecure”, can be a little addictive.

Maybe it’s because we’re all a little awkward, we’re all a little insecure and so we can relate. Or maybe it’s just because they’re so funny, so honest, so real.

Rae, who is being inducted into Variety’s Home Entertainment Hall of Fame, is a true viral Internet sensation-goes-Hollywood success story. She nimbly navigates the supposed divide between new media and old and dabbles in all sorts of tangents, including a talk show with creatives, behind-the-scenes mini-docus, and a curated collection of short films “from creators of color”. Upcoming projects include “Sweet Life”, a coming-of-age tale of teens growing up in Windsor Hills (an affluent, predominately African-American community in Los Angeles) and “Him or Her”, centered around a black man’s dating life, both for HBO.

The one commonality: Rae, born in LA to a doctor and a schoolteacher, likes to focus on African-American life, people and experiences as they really are, not how Hollywood would like them to be. As she told a newspaper in 2015, “I’ve always had an issue with the that people of color, and black people especially, aren’t relatable. I know we are.”

Given the success of her web series, her YouTube channel (“Issa Rae Presents: Bringing You Quality Content of Color”, with more than 400,000 subscribers), her HBO series and just about everything else she touches, it’s hard to argue with that.

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Netflix will still be there for fans of the old TV series “Friends”, but maintaining the relationship will come at a steep price.

The video streaming service paid $100 million to keep showing “Friends” in the US through 2019, according to a report in the New York Times. That’s more than triple the $30 million a year Netflix had been paying for the long-running TV series about six 20-something friends in New York. The report cited two unidentified people with direct knowledge of Netflix’s deal with the series’ rights holder, AT&T.

Netflix tweeted that it will continue showing “Friends”, but didn’t disclose financial details. The Los Gatos, California, company declined further comment Tuesday.

Netflix’s willingness to pay so much for a series that ended in 2004 is the latest sign of intensifying competition in video streaming.

Besides current rivals such as Hulu and Amazon, Netflix is also facing a significant threat next year when Walt Disney Co plans to roll out a video streaming service featuring its popular movies and TV shows. As part of its move into streaming, Disney will be pulling much of the entertainment that it has licensed to Netflix for years.

That setback may have figured into Netflix’s calculations about how much “Friends” is worth to its service. But Netflix is still spending far more on original programming such as “Stranger Things” and “The Crown” to distinguish itself from its rivals. The strategy has forced Netflix to take on billions of dollars in debt to pay for the programming, but it has helped the company build the world’s largest video streaming service with 137 million subscribers.

AT&T also is planning to offer a video streaming service, and there is nothing in its deal with Netflix that prevents it from featuring “Friends” on that service beginning in 2020, according to the Times.

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Much has changed at CBS Corp in recent months, but one thing will not: its focus on producing video content.

Speaking at an investor conference Tuesday, CBS Corp Chief Creative Officer David Nevins – who was named to the role in October after running Showtime for several years – articulated a strategy that is much like that the company followed before its former CEO, Leslie Moonves, was ousted in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment. Moonves has denied many of the claims.

Nevins has been charged with overseeing content development not only for the company’s flagship broadcast network, CBS and Showtime, but also CBS All Access, the subscription video-on-demand outlet. He said he wanted each venue to have its own identity. “My job is not to sort of homogenize,” he said to attendees of UBS annual conference for media investors.

Some changes are on the way. Nevins indicated CBS would replace”The Big Bang Theory” with its spin-off, “Young Sheldon”. And he indicated the company would place new emphasis on All Access. “The 2019 offering will be way more robust than 2018,” Nevin said, vowing that “a ton more content” would be produced.

Nevins said CBS All Access and Showtime was starting to see something he called the “resubscriber” effect – those customers that come in and out of a service for certain shows now that it is an easier process than in the old days with a cable subscription. Nevins said that has made the company more sophisticated in their marketing approach to new and returning subscribers.

Boxing is a big focus for Showtime now that HBO is leaving the ring of pricey pay-per-view matches. “I think there’s great opportunity for us to own the high end of boxing,” he said. Now that CBS is able to sell PPV events directly to consumers through its streaming apps “we’ve somewhat changed the economics of the (PPV) business. We’re selling directly through our apps and keeping the distributors’ share.”

Nevins was pressed about the health of the linear schedules of CBS and Showtime and how the latter will fare after “Homeland” end its run next year. Nevins said there is a natural ebb and flow to the programming business. “Shows get older and they get more expensive. They go away and you reset your cost basis. A healthy network knows how to prepare for the go-away. The longtime Showtime chief predicted that Showtime comedy “SMILF” and drama “The Chi” are ready for growth in their sophomore seasons. Wall Street drama “Billions” is “at its peak,” he said, teasing that the upcoming fourth season “is all about vengeance.”

As for the ability of CBS to compete with the hugely deep pockets of rivals like Netflix, Nevins said the selling point to creatives is the