So what's "premium women"?
A little older — probably 24-54 and a little more economically viable than other segments, in terms of broadcast. You look at the audience for Outlander and that's the perfect audience for us. We've done a lot of research around that and figured out that women are twice as likely to buy apps that are under $10; they're more loyal; they're lifetime value on a digital side is much longer.
That term is just…
For a long time I was calling it "female-centric," but we're not trying to be Lifetime. We're not trying to put programming on that is at the exclusion of men. A lot of the couples who watch Outlander, the woman finds it and she brings her spouse to watch it. We do have a large male universe of viewers, but if it doesn't serve that female audience, it's not for us.
Still, it's such a shift because so much of what that network was built on was male-focused content like Spartacus and Black Sails.
Spartacus actually skewed female. Black Sails was a little more balanced and skewed more male. But Spartacus was female characters manipulating the men around the board. Power is 65 percent female. If you look at the show, on the surface, it's a good-looking African-American drug dealer trying to get out of the trade and it's a gangster male show. But the real core of that is it's a soap opera with a love triangle.
As you reassess your programming slate, turning your back on a critically beloved show like Counterpart — which has a 100 percent score for both seasons on RottenTomatoes.com — seems questionable. Was that decision based purely on the fact that it was a male-focused show?
Justin Marks is a great writer. I'd love to find something else we can do together, but John Landgraf grabbed him when we canceled the show. It was very complicated and there's nothing wrong with being complicated. But to a certain extent, part of my view on the world today is for the most part people's lives are tough and when they come home at night and want to escape their lives, they want to be able to get into a piece of content very easily and escape. Counterpart was really hard for people to get into — it wasn't accessible.
If Counterpart had a woman at its center, would there have been another season?
It depends. There's a lot of shows out there that have wonderful female leads that skew male. You have to be very careful. What we have seen with our Spanish Princess/White Queen series is great women in history play really well for that audience. We'll lean into that as a quasi-genre. Outlander — you can say that it's great because women like it because she's a surgeon who goes back in time, but there's also another side of that, which is there's some eye candy for that audience and people like when he [Sam Heughan] has his shirt off. You have to be really thoughtful about when you're looking at a piece of content and whether it's really going to be female or not. And it's not easy. The nice thing for us is 65 percent of our show leadership are female. You don't need me to figure it out; we have professionals doing that.
Now Apocalypse was a big swing for Starz and was canceled after one season. Was this too male-skewing? Too low-rated? Both?
I loved the show and it was a swing. It was very male. As you start to look at our portfolio of shows, because we have to have two or three things on every quarter to service this female audience, if it doesn't meet the audience, we just don't want to have it on the air right now.
Is the goal to have one version of Power in every quarter — similar to what AMC is doing with its crown jewel, The Walking Dead?
We would like to have something that serves the African-American female audience every quarter. We'd like to have a lot of stuff that serves all females every quarter. We also have to think about it globally now. What we're seeing in Europe, because so much of the content on services is sports-centric, they love our slate that we bring over there because it's so female and it's counter-programming against sports. We feel good about the strategy and feel like it's not work to get to this mandate. It is the business and it is the right thing to do.
Netflix, Amazon, Apple, HBO and WarnerMedia are spending billions on content. How does a premium cable network like Starz compete with that?
Netflix has done a good job convincing Wall Street that if you don't spend $15 billion on content, you should go home — which I don't think is the case. If you look at our OTT product domestically, we're growing faster than HBO and Showtime with a third to a fourth of the content. When you have a show like Power, it doesn't matter if you're spending $13 billion — you'ev got lightning in a bottle and that's all you need. We're not trying to compete with those guys; we're a premium service. We've always been sold on top of TV, cable, satellite, Amazon, Hulu. You'll see a day when we're sold on top of Disney. We are unique in our programming strategy and we are a great compliment to all those services. I'm not trying to replace television. At the end of the day, homes will have four or five of these services and we're happy to be number two, three or four. And if we can be number three around the world with our unique programming strategy, coupled with a couple of hits, that's a great place for us to live.
