SILLY — AND SUPER
Digital studio may be shaping the future of television.
LOS ANGELES — It started as a goofy experiment: a low-budget Spanish-language soap opera packed with the usual tropes — a pretty young maid in distress, a vengeful wife, a handsome hero and even a horse.
But in this telenovela, the audience is invited to play along by choosing plot twists in real time. The show streams on Facebook Live and, in a recent episode, the action paused for 30 seconds so viewers could decide whether the wife should disguise herself as a hairy gorilla, a giant lobster or a colorful clown.
As viewers around the world voted, their preferences flashed on the screen. “It’s going to be the lobster,” the show’s production manager shouted on the set. The actress then slipped behind a partition to scramble into a red shellfish costume.
This may be the future of television.
“We’re telling the audience: You can choose your own adventure,” said Wolfgang Hammer, president of Super Deluxe, the eclectic Los Angeles entertainment company behind the live telenovela.
Super Deluxe, which launched early last year, is testing different forms of storytelling to engage young viewers. It has sought out unconventional characters to develop scripted programs for television, screwball contests for the Internet, political spoofs and other videos, including the over-the-top telenovela, for Facebook Live, the platform that enables users to share live videos with their friends. The videos have generated eye-popping traffic numbers and high levels of viewer engagement.
The start-up studio represents a bold step by Turner, the cable television giant that boasts such prominent channels as TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies, to address a fundamental problem vexing the television industry.
Millennials, those aged 18 to 35, don’t watch television like their parents. They are less inclined to sign up for pricey pay-TV packages, opting instead for a video-on-demand option so they can choose what and when they want to watch. They spend a huge chunk of their free time on social media and on their smartphones.
A flood of new-media companies, including BuzzFeed, AwesomenessTV, Gunpowder & Sky and others, also are attempting to reach this coveted audience. Walt Disney Co. spent $675 million to buy Maker Studios. NBCUniversal, AT&T, Verizon Communications and Google Inc. also have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in digital media platforms and studios. But the results have been mixed.
“It’s not a great business if you are trying to find needles in a haystack,” said Kevin Reilly, chief creative officer of Turner Entertainment, which owns Super Deluxe, and a veteran programmer who previously ran entertainment for Fox Broadcasting and NBC. “It’s low-percentage ball.”
Turner, a division of New York media giant Time Warner Inc., has taken a different approach from other media companies by fashioning a studio from the ground up.
“We said: ‘Let’s build a manufacturing system for programming,’ “Reilly said.
Super Deluxe’s selfdescribed mission is to “future-proof ” television — to figure out how to survive the disruption while producing original and distinctive programming that young consumers will embrace.
But the competition is fierce.
“Consumers evaluate whether they are going to watch a video on a split-second basis,” said Melanie Shreffler, senior director of insights at Cassandra, a consulting firm in New York that studies youth culture. “Companies have to be a lot more nimble these days.”
Super Deluxe is based in a hipster-cool, 93-year-old office tower in downtown Los Angeles, a nod to the region’s revitalization — and its proximity to Hollywood.
“We asked ourselves when we started: ‘Does the world need more video?’ The answer, on the surface, is ‘no,’ “said Hammer, a Stanford-educated Austrian who leads Super Deluxe. “But there is an
opportunity now to build an entertainment business that looks like, and takes in, the best of Hollywood.”
Hammer, 40, who joined Turner two years ago, is a veteran of the television and film business. While a program executive at Media Rights Capital, he pushed for a remake of a BBC show that became Netflix’s first scripted drama “House of Cards.” He was a film executive at Lionsgate and served nearly four years as copresident of CBS’ feature film division, curating such well-received movies as “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” a 2011 British romantic drama, and “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the 2013 Coen brothers’ film about a struggling folk singer in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961.
A publicity poster from “Llewyn Davis” hangs in Hammer’s corner office with exposed brick walls. Here, Hammer explained a pet peeve: He doesn’t consider Super Deluxe a digital content studio.
“I’m so against this term ‘digital’ because digital to me always just implies cheap and bad,” Hammer said. “We’re an entertainment company first and foremost. We are trying to build an artistic brand that people love.”
Super Deluxe was the name of an earlier digital video effort that Turner abandoned during the Great Recession. But Hammer liked the name and its retro vibe. The term ‘super deluxe’ was used to market albums and other quality products.
His plan is to produce a variety of content — television shows and offbeat videos — so that viewers recognize the Super Deluxe brand and, perhaps, eventually pay for a subscription for its content. For now, the content is free.
“The goal of this company is to be a consumer brand,” Hammer said. “We want to drive culture.”
Turner would not disclose its investment in Super Deluxe, but company executives said they view the platform as a farm club to scout for emerging talent, collaborate with rising stars in Hollywood and experiment with ways to reach audiences — particularly those who are glued to their mobile phones.
“How do we create value for the mobile consumers and turn it into value for our company?” Reilly said. “We can’t sit this one out.”
Most of the group’s 71-member workforce are millennials, and nearly 50 percent come from diverse backgrounds. The studio also relies on nearly four dozen contractors, including Vic Berger, a Pennsylvania music therapist turned video editor who has become an Internet sensation by creating mash-up videos, punctuated with air horn blasts, that zero in on awkward moments involving President Donald Trump, other politicians and celebrities.
Early efforts have been promising. On election night in November, as CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox News anchors focused on high-tech maps of the U.S. as presidential votes were tallied, Super Deluxe published its own map of the U.S. This one was engulfed in flames, and there was audio of a crackling fire, similar to the low-tech holiday Yuletide log video. The “Super Deluxe Election Map” has been viewed more than 23 million times and was one of the year’s top videos on Facebook.
In February, Super Deluxe staged a footrace between an actual tortoise and a hare on a makeshift track with artificial turf sidelines. More than 3.4 million people have watched the 39-minute marathon, which was streamed on Facebook Live.
This month Super Deluxe served up its own irreverent version of the live testimony of former FBI Director James Comey before a U.S. Senate committee. Viewers were encouraged to suggest comical alterations to a live stream of the hearing. Super Deluxe producers then mixed in special effects, including laugh tracks and audio distortions so senators’ voices sounded like those on “Alvin & the Chipmunks.” They drew cat whiskers on Comey’s face and superimposed someone else’s arms onto his body to make it appear that the fired FBI chief was playing the bongos.
The Comey video generated 483,000 live views, nearly 40 percent higher traffic than ABC News’ stream of the hearing, according to video analytics firm Delmondo.
“These are brilliantly silly ideas — but they are working,” said Reilly, who also is president of TNT and TBS, which plans to carve out a 90-minute late-night comedy block as early as next year to showcase Super Deluxe content.