In a candid interview with The Live Feed, CW President of Entertainment Dawn Ostroff shares hints about the types of new series the network is interested in, plus feedback about current hits and shows still on the bubble.
Ostroff: We’ve been trying to find more franchise shows…where the personal relationships continue on in each episode, [such as] CSI or Grey’s Anatomy, and the (stories) have a beginning, middle and end. The intention was to get a broader scope of programming on the network so that not all of the shows we did were soap operas, per se.
Ostroff: HMS is a more traditional show for us, with its own twist that makes it right for The CW. It’s set at Harvard Medical School, and the pilot’s entry point is through first-year students. What makes it unique is that these people are learning about the profession at the most prestigious med school—you’re steeped in history, but with cutting-edge medicine. It’s going to be as much of a show-and-tell about medical science as the emotional cases of different patients and the relationships between the characters themselves.
Ostroff: Smallville has had a great year (both) creatively and moving to Friday nights. What Vampire Diaries has done so well is, it’s not just a genre show. It has romance and humor and friends that feel like family, so many elements that work on different levels for all of our audience. Great writing, great casting, a topic that’s in the zeitgeist and a known franchise is always what we look for. We picked up a pilot called Betwixt, which is a ‘genre’ show, but has many of the same elements.
Ostroff: 90210 creatively is light-years away from where it was last year. Sometimes that show is watched more on DVR than live; you have a lot of people time-shifting our shows and watching in different ways. (On the likelihood of renewing One Tree Hill), we’re encouraged. We think Mark Schwahn has done a great job with the show. The fans are the most loyal and dedicated I think I’ve ever seen. They have some 1.6 million fans on Facebook. Too early to tell, but creatively we feel the show is in a really good place. (And on Life Unexpected), that’s really too early to tell.
Ostroff: I believe The CW is more boy-friendly than most people think. There are some really dynamic women at the core of (new) shows—Betwixt, Nikita, Nomads—that hopefully will be interesting to men. I know more men who watch Gossip Girl than you can imagine. We’re working on a lot of different reality projects, a couple things for fall and for summer, and we’re looking at our reality shows as having comedy. One pilot show, Wyoming, which Amy Sherman-Palladino wrote, also has a lot of humor. So it’s different ways of doing comedy.
