Specs
Age 45
Accomplishments Head writer and executive producer of Futurama, which premieres on Comedy Central on June 20 at 10 p.m.; former writer on The Simpsons
Base Los Angeles

What’s the first information you consume in the morning?
I guess it would be the time and how late I am for work.

What do you read or watch or listen to at the breakfast table?
I watch my 5-year-old daughter spilling cereal on her face.

What occupies your mind in the car?
My big thing now is books on tape—actually books on download—because I have this long commute like everybody in L.A., and I was wasting it listening to the five-minute news cycle. So suddenly, I actually listen to books on tape coming and going. If there’s one key change in my information diet, it’s audio books.

Are you a TV junkie or on an airtime-restricted diet?
When I do watch TV, it’s pre-recorded and DVRed. We have a joke on Futurama here and there about other TV shows, but I guess just because of the epic nature of our sci-fi stories, we tend to reference movies.

What do you consume on television?
Game of Thrones is my thing right now. I’ve been given all the books as a birthday present, but I don’t want to read them because I don’t want to ruin the show.

What do you bite into on the way home?
I just started listening to a science-fiction trilogy—Peter Hamilton’s Void Trilogy—and I just finished Stephen King’s JFK book 11/22/63. I quite enjoyed it, even though it felt like sci-fi for people who don’t read sci-fi.

What tech from Futurama would you most like to see show up in the real world?
I just read about someone starting a company that claims to build transport tubes that can send you around the world in a tube like a letter in an old ’50s office building. I think that would be cool—to just shoot over to Japan for a day in a tube.

Give us the skinny on your favorite app.
Oh, here’s a good one: the Samsung TV remote app I downloaded, which I can use as a remote for my TV from anywhere in the house. So I can change the volume and stuff from another room and annoy people. It’s one I was waiting for because the smartphone seems to be putting devices out of commission one by one, and the remote control just seemed ripe for that. My flashlight is gone now.

With such a bloated media universe, how do you cut out the fat?
I’m not good at cutting out the fat, but my schedule makes it a moot point. I have to be in a room talking to the writers all day, every day. My brain doesn’t have the capability to do that while reading online. I do that every now and then, but then I see people looking at me saying, “Why aren’t we working?” It’s peer pressure, honestly.

Like someone joggling a Magic 8-Ball in order to elicit a more positive result, the CW has shaken up its prime-time schedule, sending four of its signature programs to new nights and prepping five new series.

Franchise dramas 90210 and Gossip Girl will be reunited on Monday nights, with the West Beverly crew leading into the Upper East Siders. While this will mark the final season of Gossip Girl, a definitive episode order has not been established.

Speaking to reporters today after the network’s upfront presentation, CW president Mark Pedowitz said his team is in the midst of deciding on how best to close out Gossip Girl. “Our goal is to run it in the fall and end it in the fall,” Pedowitz said, adding that the show’s creators have been instrumental in coming to a decision on the final order. Odds are, the season will run between 11 and 13 episodes.

Pedowitz promised an “OMFG” ending for Gossip Girl, which came into being at the same time texting and Facebook were transforming the teenage cultural apparatus. (The impact the series has had on the New York subset of Generation WTF was apparent by the screaming throng of young girls camped out across the street from the Midtown venue where the CW gave its upfront pitch.)

With Gossip Girl moving up to the Monday 9 p.m. time slot, sophomore series Hart of Dixie jumps to Tuesday night, where it will set the table for the new medical drama Emily Owens, M.D. Starring Mamie Gummer (a dead ringer for mommy Meryl), Emily Owens suggests that working in a hospital is a lot like high school, but with a lot more thoracic surgery.

As the schedule progresses into the heart of the week, it becomes apparent that the CW is looking to expand beyond the young-female demo. At 8 p.m. Wednesday, the dark superhero/action series Arrow will draw a bead on a greater cohort of male viewers, although the requisite beefcake should satisfy traditional CW die-hards.

Based on the DC Comics character Green Arrow, the new series also taps into the nation’s newly realized craze for archery (see also: Katniss from The Hunger Games, Hawkeye of The Avengers renown, nearly every character in NBC’s upcoming drama Revolution).

The midseason drama Cult should also cast a wider net. A meta-fiction about an investigative reporter investigating a TV show that attracts a deadly audience of enthusiasts, Cult shares some thematic DNA with Kevin Williamson’s serial-killer strip, The Following (Fox).

Rather than introduce its new series in the midst of the early-fall premiere fray, the CW will delay its 2012-13 launch until October.

The new series that seems most likely to draw a crowd is The Carrie Diaries, a prequel of sorts to Sex and the City. Set in 1984, the show introduces a larval-stage Carrie Bradshaw, a 16-year-old who’s grown out of Big Bird but is nowhere near mature enough for Mr. Big.

In a nod to the HBO series’ framing device, The Carrie Diaries features a voiceover accompanied by the image of Ms. Bradshaw recording her thoughts and impressions on paper. (True fact, CW demo: We didn’t have computers back then. The few who did—like Carrie’s future husband, David Lightman—owned 8-bit systems with flashing green cursors. You have no idea how good you have it.)

The Carrie Diaries will inherit the Monday 8 p.m. time slot after Gossip Girl wraps.

Once again, the one thing you won’t see on the CW this fall is scripted comedy, although Pedowitz said the network is inching closer to picking up a 30-minute series. “There were two scripts we were hot on that we will probably put into development,” he said, before adding that the priority was to “re-stabilize the schedule. And drama was the way to do it.”

Before concluding his Q&A session, Pedowitz said the cancelation of the much-ballyhooed series Ringer does not spell an end to the network’s relationship with Sarah Michelle Gellar. “She will be back on the CW in some form, whether as a producer or an actress,” he said. After a promising premiere, Ringer was hampered by a two-month hiatus. “It’s unfortunate,” Pedowitz said. “The show went away in November and came back in January and the audience had moved on somewhere else.”

The CW’s fall prime time schedule is as follows (new series in bold):

Monday

8-9 p.m. — 90210
9-10 p.m. — Gossip Girl

(The Carrie Diaries premieres January 2013)

Tuesday

8-9 p.m. — Hart of Dixie
9-10 p.m. — Emily Owens, M.D.

Wednesday

8-9 p.m. — Arrow
9-10 p.m. — Supernatural

Thursday

8-9 p.m. — The Vampire Diaries
9-10 p.m. — Beauty and the Beast

Friday

8-9 p.m. — America’s Next Top Model
9-10 p.m. — Nikita

Comedy Central's "Fully Torqued" phallic billboard on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard touting the new season of its Workaholics sitcom is awfully silly. TMZ claiming that its coverage of the sign is an "Exclu-Stiff" is even sillier. The show follows the lives of three recent college grads—and they finished cum laude, judging from that billboard. I'm not entirely sure what I meant by that, but I'm a firm believer that HBO got a bigger bang for its buck using a similar concept to promote Hung two years ago. The TMZ commenters' views on the Workaholics ad are priceless. One claims that the sign "looks more like a bra for Total Recall's three-breasted woman," while another moans, "Why must an ad like this appear? Is it really necessary? Oh well, next stop the old folks home and then it's a dirt nap. Come on death." Why fret? All those disturbed, offended or befuddled by such displays should remember that these things always come down eventually. At least, I've never heard of one staying up forever.

USA is doubling down on its commitment to digital media this year, with a broad portfolio of ancillary projects—six, covering the network's slate of originals—to boost viewership, attract mega fans, and provide deeper ad integrations for the shows' partners while the series are running. This year, the company has not one but four major automotive sponsors (Ford, Toyota, Lincoln and Lexus) buying tie-in digital integrations, and Capital One on a fifth. 

Unscripted television is no stranger to these sorts of deals, but USA's collection of character-driven dramedies would seem to be a harder sell, not to advertisers, but to writers. But programming honcho Bill McGoldrick told Adweek that his writers have been using the integrations (created with companies like Ford and Capital One) to further flesh out corners of the worlds they've been creating that might otherwise go unexplored.

"A lot of our shows are closed-ended A stories," McGoldrick said (meaning the episode-long tale that drives a 42-minute narrative). "We usually have a personal B story, and what we have left over tends to be the C story, and that's the mythology. When you start dividing up the pie between the three, you're only left with so much for that C story," he said. The shows' writers, McGoldrick added, like the concept. "Left to their own devices, they'd probably want to tell more of the stories anyway," he said.

To that end, USA will devote what it's calling "social TV" to those mythologies. Covert Affairs will have a video-based "branching narrative" (think a simple role-playing game) generated in partnership with Capital One that follows secondary character Augie (Chris Gorham) through his first mission after being blinded. Gorham is the unofficial mascot of the digital integrations program—and everyone from McGoldrick to marketing and digital evp Alexandra Shapiro says that he devotes significant time to social media promotion of the shows. Covert Affairs gets a deeper backstory for Gorham's character, and Capital One gets an exotic locale in which to tout its services. "We were able to shoot this on location in Spain because the show was filming there," said Shapiro.

Ford is back for one of the longest-running integrations: Neal's Stash—a "treasure hunt" for White Collar, similar to last year's Mozzie's Mission, this time with a crowdsourcing component. Crystal Worthem, brand content and alliance manager for Ford, said that USA's focus on mega fans helped to sell them on the idea. "Ten, 11 years ago, we got involved in a lot of integration, with the biggest being American Idol, and we've found that it's very difficult to get a gauge of how engaged people actually are." With the incentive of further canonical information about their favorite series, though, Worthem said she's pleased with the level of attention, say, the new Taurus is getting from Collar-ites.

"Everybody from Marlboro to airlines understands the power of super-users," said Shapiro. "You have to cater to your rabid, core fans, because they wield a tremendous amount of power and influence, and if they're messaged properly, they have a tremendous ability to affect friends and friends of friends."

Burn Notice will get a third installment of its tie-in DC comic book (which provides pre-series backstory for central couple Michael and Fiona). Necessary Roughness will get a Lincoln-sponsored look into the case files of Nico, the "fixer" for the show's central football team. Toyota will back a Viggle integration that allows fans to look at behind-the-scenes video for Royal Pains, and Lexus will sponsor the first integration for Suits, entitled Suits Recruits.

The latter is a good indication of how quickly USA has to evolve in order to keep its digital components up to speed with rapidly developing tech. The game allows fans to join Suits law firm Pearson Hardman as either an assistant or a paralegal, and it will set up a Twitter/Facebook-style social feed on which fans can talk to each other about the progress of the story. Each set of fans gets proprietary information, and in order to get to the end of the story, each user has to find a different character class to share that info. The integrations are becoming longer and multi-phase to keep viewers hooked over the course of a full season. 

All of this, say McGoldrick and Shapiro, is designed not simply to give advertisers a chance to buy more comprehensive spots, but to create a world for fans to get lost in. Increasingly, especially as extremely narrow advertisers like Facebook prove themselves effective, fan service is seen as marketing to fans' friends, who value their pals' opinions or just watch an episode or two to know what a buddy is talking about.

"[Devoted fans] become your most important marketing assets, really," said McGoldrick. "In a lot of ways, more important than the traditional channels you and I grew up with. One of those fans is worth one billboard."

The upfronts are supposed to be an opportunity for cable and broadcast networks—and now digital content providers—to unveil their slates of new programming before an audience of advertising executives, in a bid to impress said execs into turning their pockets inside out.

But tugging dollars from industry wallets takes more than a PowerPoint presentation. The upfront is also a network's only chance to strut its stuff and throw money around, spoiling its most important audience—while demonstrating its health, spirit and vitality in much the same way as a debutante. 

Now deep into the broadcast upfront schedule (most of the cable presentations were held last week or earlier), it's apparent some networks know how to play the game while others are still finding their way off the sidelines. Here are the 10 best upfront parties attended by Adweek so far. 

10. Turner: Out of the Dark and Into the Digital



The network’s upfront rocked for two reasons. It used a video presentation to make light of last year’s major upfront screwup, in which the Hammerstein Ballroom’s power went out, forcing Conan O’Brien to joke the audience through the problem. And although it held its presentation at 9:30 a.m.—presumably to avoid having to serve anything tastier or more intoxicating than bagels—the net announced an intriguing new partnership with laugh-a-minute digital content provider Funny or Die.

9. MTV: Mentions Music for Once



Sure, the reference was to tween-swoon manufacturer and alleged singer Justin Bieber, but the network called “Music Television” still actually mentioned music. When was the last time that happened—1996? The show also featured a knocked-up Snooki, Alicia Keys and an after-party that included oddball treats like margarita-flavored marshmallows and run-and-coke pop rocks—as well as a photo booth for attendees to nab shots with stars.

8. Hulu: Breaking the Digital Upfront Cherry



The streaming service’s first, highly anticipated upfront came with some exciting news: Much of its revenue is being directed into new original programming. Could Hulu become the new cable?

7. Oxygen: One Night Without Paris



This net’s upfront makes the list for one simple reason: no Paris Hilton. Last year, the inexplicably famous hotel heiress was borne in on a Lucite palanquin by four hunks in sailor suits. But at this year’s event, Hilton—whose most recent show saw its ratings never leave the gutter—was blessedly absent.

6. Syfy: New Alien Species Discovered, Mounted in Museum



It takes some cojones to think you can decorate a room better than the curators of the American Museum of Natural History, but Syfy’s transformation of the space—specifically, the Hall of Biodiversity—made it seem the storied museum had added a new alien species to its exhibit. The glowing upside-down Y-shaped thing looked kind of like an ostrich with a mustache and watched over an event that featured such cutting-edge tech as pretzel-launching sconces.

5. Disney: Bring the Kids and Let’s Get Drunk 



It may be a kids’ network, but Disney still applied an adult-style wine-and-dine strategy to its high-tech, bring-your-kids fête at New York’s Hard Rock Cafe. It was an event that bordered on the surreal. Amid the detritus of the lives of such notables as Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison were squeaky-clean displays of toys and licensed tchotchkes from Disney hits Phineas and Ferb and Jake and the Never Land Pirates, a series with both a cartoon component and the Never Land Pirate Band, a Raffi-esque duo singing sea shanties for kids before Disney tapped them for the show.

4. BBC America: Be the First Ad Buyer to Die Falling Drunk From a Trapeze



There were the trapeze artists, who perched on giant rings hung from the ceiling and stretched into improbable positions. There were the burlesque dancers, who took off exactly enough of their outfits to stay suitable for basic cable TV (actually, let's say basic cable after 10 p.m.). There was the drunk ad buyer who jumped into an empty trapeze and had his friends spin him around until he fell off. And then there were the fire-breathers.

3. ABC: Mutinous Monologue Makes for Much Merriment



He definitely went after ABC’s rival nets with a verbal bayonet, but late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel broke rank to also skewer his home network for mistakes it surely would prefer fade into broadcast history. For example, he pointed out that the comedy Work It signaled ABC entertainment group president Paul Lee’s inherent disdain for Americans. It’s much classier to sling mud when you’ve taken a dip in the puddle yourself.

2. A&E: The One Where Jennifer Love Hewitt Threw Herself at a Network Exec



A&E would have made this list anyway, what with executives dressing to match brand logos, plus the live music and copious free booze—but even more memorable is ad sales president Mel Berning’s refusal to be seduced by none other than '90s-teen-male-fantasy Jennifer Love Hewitt. Why, Mel ... why?!

1. Bravo: Are You Sure This Is the Way to the Upfront?



What better entrance to an upfront party than a freight elevator behind a roller-shutter garage door? But behind the low-rent façade hid major network talent, many of whom (at least the ladies) could be seen ditching New York City-streetwise sneakers for the flashy footwear more befitting a boldface name. Bravo stars—they’re just like us!