The Business Model of TV's Future Is Being Built With the Dealmaking Tools of Film's Past

The "indie TV" business may be new, but the dealmaking tools needed to make it work are not.

When people ask me what a business affairs executive does for a living, I usually give them the same answer that most anyone else would: we make deals.

It’s a fine response. It’s easy for laypeople to understand, representative of how we spend most of our time at work, and consistent with how we’re viewed by most of the industry. I once had a boss who proudly referred to his team of business affairs executives as “The Negotiators.” I thought it sounded like the title of a procedural drama on CBS that I would never watch (but would quietly run for seven seasons). But it made him happy, and it spoke to how central the role of “dealmaker” can become to the professional identity of many people who do this work.

Even so, I’ve always quietly preferred a different answer: we solve problems.

That framing reflects my own biases — in particular, my perhaps surprisingly limited love for the negotiation process itself. But it also reminds me that deals don’t exist in a vacuum; they exist to help large groups of people come together to bring something new and valuable into the world. Making a movie or television series is incredibly difficult. Making money on it is even harder. On the long road from nascent idea to successful production, every closed deal is an obstacle overcome — and the best dealmaking tools are the ones that help you clear as many obstacles as possible, as efficiently as possible.

Which brings me, for the fourth and final time, to the 50/50 pools waterfall.

I didn’t set out to write 10,000 words about a revenue sharing structure (especially one that is still found mostly outside of television). But the 50/50 pools waterfall turns out to be one of those rare dealmaking tools that genuinely solves problems — not just one problem, but several of the most fundamental challenges facing any new business that needs to unite the people with the money and the people with the talent. Today I want to show you what those problems look like in the specific context of indie TV, and why this particular tool is so well-suited to solving them.

Indie TV 1.0: Graveyard of Spec Pilots

Although the 50/50 pools waterfall has been a mainstay of the independent film world for decades, it has historically had little presence in the television business. That’s largely because, for most of the medium’s history, there really hasn’t been any such thing as “independent television.”

As I explained last Monday, the bifurcation of financing/production from distribution (with the latter secured only after the former is complete) is what puts the “independent” in “independent film.” But television has long been rooted firmly in the “commission” model, in which pilot or series production commences only after an anchor network has “ordered” it (and committed to pay negotiated license fees, irrespective of how well it comes out). Traditionally, the notion of “independent television” has been regarded by most industry insiders almost as a contradiction in terms, fundamentally at odds with how shows are actually picked and produced in the real world. Not that that stopped people from trying.