Gina Balian and Nick Grad Luis Diaz Jr.
FOR SAYING “YES, CHEF” TO SINGULAR CREATORS FOR UNLEASHING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM ON HARD-TO-TREAT CANCERS—AND SUCCEEDING
IN JUNE 2022, FX LAUNCHED a drama series about a down-onhis-luck chef who returns home to run his family’s sandwich shop in Chicago. The Bear not only racked up awards and critical acclaim— and inspired Italian beef joints to open around the country—but it captured a broad swath of ravenous viewers and became the network’s most-watched half-hour of TV. Viewership was 54% female, and evenly distributed among the three age groups (18–34, 35–49, and 50+), throwing salt on current industry wisdom that content needs to be developed specifically for narrow demographic niches. (Season 2 premiered June 22.) “It’s a food show, but it’s also not a food show,” says Nick Grad, who, with Gina Balian, was promoted last fall from overseeing original programming at FX to president of the network. “It’s more like Taxi—a workplace comedy where you’re stuck with people whom you may not normally hang out with in your regular life.”
The Bear is just the latest creative triumph for FX, which boasts one of the industry’s most consistent track records in hitmaking, as well as for Balian and Grad, whose rise at the network speaks to parent company Disney’s trust in their ability to identify talent and take chances on projects. Indeed, while competitors build shows around namebrand stars and creators, Balian and Grad—who have worked at FX for 10 and 20 years, respectively—have hired first-time showrunners such as Taffy Brodesser-akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble) and Sterlin Harjo (Reservation Dogs), creating a lineup of distinctive programming.
Balian says that the pair’s longevity at Fx—they have overseen such shows as American Crime Story, Fargo, and What We Do in the Shadows—has helped them develop a shorthand that leads to good decisions. She describes it as “a level of trust and respect. You need that in a creative environment. You need to feel comfortable being honest.”
IIN THE LATE 2000s, Luis Diaz Jr. never would have predicted that he’d spearhead one of the immunotherapy breakthroughs of the century. But when he heard that immunotherapies—which activate the immune system to kill cancer cells—were shrinking tumors in lung cancer, that got his attention. “Nothing works in lung cancer,” he says.
Diaz figured that immunotherapy worked for the same reasons traditional treatments often fail. Because lung cancer tumors have lots of mutations, they can adapt to evade chemotherapy. But these mutations make them extra vulnerable to so-called immune checkpoint inhibitors, which release immune cells’ “brakes” and allow them to attack things that look foreign—such as highly mutated cancer cells. Tumors with a genetic alteration called MMR deficiency have even more mutations, and Diaz and his team suspected that checkpoint inhibitors would work in them too. He led a trial treating dozens of patients’ Mmr-deficient tumors with the checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda). While the patients had varied types of cancer, three-quarters showed some level of disease control in response to the treatment—results that led, in 2017, to the FDA’S first “tumor agnostic” approval for a cancer drug. Diaz and his colleague Andrea Cercek were convinced that treating patients earlier—even before surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation— would lead to even better outcomes. In 2022, they led a trial in patients with advanced Mmr-deficient rectal cancer, which had a miraculous 100% success rate: After six months of treatment with the immune checkpoint inhibitor Jemperli, all 18 patients saw their tumors disappear. “We didn’t even need to touch them with a scalpel,” says Diaz. He hopes to run trials for gastric, esophageal, prostate, and pancreatic cancer.