Jessica Rhoades has been in the TV game for more than two decades with series such as Sharp Objects, Station Eleven, The Affair, Dirty John and Black Mirror all under her belt, but now, as her Pacesetter Productions banner enters its 10th year, she’s really finding her groove.
The California native, who recently relocated to London and opened a UK office, is coming off the back of launching her latest series Ponies on Peacock, a groovy eight-part 1970s Cold War espionage thriller with Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson. It’s co-created, co-written and exec produced by Susanna Fogel (The Flight Attendant) and David Iserson (Mr. Robot).
Last year, she wrapped an untitled Newfoundland-based limited series with Josh Hartnett for Netflix as well as Brooker’s upcoming Netflix show Project Codename (working title), a four-part detective series with Paddy Considine, Lena Hadley and Georgina Campbell.
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Additional projects in the pipeline include Season 8 of Black Mirror, Bridgerton creator Chris Van Dusen’s TV adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s book Girl Abroad, the first project to come out of Pacesetter’s first-look deal with A24, and Mandy Moore erotic thriller Teach Me from Gypsy creator Lisa Rubin, which it just sold to Peacock.
It’s a grey and gloomy January morning when Deadline sits down for a rare interview with Rhoades where she opens up about her robust slate, her deep respect for writers and how her work on Black Mirror helped pave the way for her to expand Pacesetter into the UK.
“From the get-go, the idea with Pacesetter was that it would be a turnkey producing partner for writers,” says Rhoades. “If you’re a writer and you want to showrun – whether you’ve done it before or you’ve never done it – we’re your producing partner and that means that everyone that works at this company works for you too.”
The company currently has nine staff – five in the UK, including Head of Production Mark Kinsella and Exec Producer Louise Sutton, and four in the L.A. office, including Executive VP Alison Mo Massey and Director of Development Bryan Daly.
“Alison was building such an amazing team in the U.S. and that office was thriving,” she says. “I started hiring here in the UK to support the next two shows Charlie and I have.”
Pacesetter, says Rhoades, was born out of a yearn to work with high-calibre writers and showrunners. “On all of our shows, we keep the writers very close to us and it’s a very writer-driven model,” she says. “We know that if you’re having a problem in the edit, pull out the script because there is a really good shot that the answer is in there. There was something in me that understood that for years.”
She is insistent that everyone at Pacesetter reads everything they are working on. “It’s important that we have a single vision together with the creator that is executed and achieves the need for the platform and the studio. So far, it’s working and it feels good.”
‘Black Mirror’ & ‘Ponies’
It was towards the end of Pacesetter’s first look deal with Netflix when the platform introduced Brooker to Rhoades. Brooker’s Broke and Bones banner, which he established with longtime producer Annabel Jones, was nearing the end of its $100M five-year buyout with the streamer. Rhoades and Brooker hit it off and she came aboard to exec produce Season 6 of Black Mirror. Jones still remains an executive producer on the series.
Rhoades’ background of working extensively in the U.S. brought a fresh way of working to the established and beloved dystopian series and while she admits that Black Mirror is a “hard show to make,” she says it’s helped to look at each episode as a pilot.
“I look at them this way because in each episode, you have to make sure that the showrunner is in every single ounce of it and I think that’s made a big change between seasons previous,” she says. “I know it sounds like semantics but instead of looking at these as five or six movies, we look at them as five or six pilots from the same showrunner and then we think about what we are going to do differently at every step. I think that process ended up making Charlie feel, creatively, incredibly engaged.”
Rhoades had been flying back and forth from L.A. for Season 6 of Black Mirror but it was her commitment to Season 7, which earned 10 Emmy nominations and its first ever Golden Globe noms, coupled with Ponies gearing up to shoot in Budapest, Hungary, that drove her to relocate her family to London.
“I consider Charlie my producing partner and he’s also just one of my favorite people,” she says. “He’s such a good time. It was not a hard decision to say yes to producing more than Black Mirror with him and move my family to England to be able to make that possible.”
Meanwhile, Ponies, which launched January 15 on Peacock, was a culmination of four years of work for Rhoades and her team and being close to the action as it began to shoot in Europe was integral.
Rhoades was making sci-fi drama series Utopia in Chicago for creator and author Gillian Flynn when “by hook or crook” Rhoades was able to convince Fogel to direct a block of episodes for the series.
Fogel was about to shoot The Flight Attendant pilot and Rhoades recalls her expressing a desire to focus on writing and directing rather than solely directing. “We had this whole conversation over one of those breakfasts that were actually burgers because it was a night shoot and I remember telling her that I really thought she should go and do that pilot and also do that writing. I felt like someone that talented should be thriving in all of the creative spaces available.”
A few years later, when Rhoades was in the middle of shooting Station Eleven in Toronto. Fogel and Iserson sent her the script for the first episode. When Clarke was attached, Peacock gave it a straight-to-series order.
Set in Moscow in 1977, the series follows two “Ponies” (an intelligence acronym for “persons of no interest”) who work anonymously as secretaries in the American embassy. When their husbands are killed under mysterious circumstances, the pair become CIA operatives.
“It took some time to find the right women to lead this – the chemistry is so important,” she says of the leads. “I was compelled by the funny and original idea and the second script just hit it out of the park. Then there was a regime change, a strike and all of these things that prolonged it, but it was just one of those wonderful experiences where they kept doing the work and putting it on the page and making it impossible not to read.”
First steps
Rhoades gravitated to writers from a young age. Her brother is a writer and she produced his short films “to get free bagels”. She took an MFA at UCLA after she saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer and EP Marti Noxon’s name in the credits of the series. “I saw there was an ‘i’ on [the name] Marti and that she was a woman who was an executive producer in the business. I just went down a rabbit hole of what that was and how I could do that. I learned that writers had control of television and that became really exciting for me.”
While many of her peers moved to the feature film world, Rhoades kept a firm eye on the TV sector. “For me, I just wanted to work with writers and help get their vision to the screen. Television seemed like the best way to do it.”
She continues: “I want to help writers do the best they can possibly do and collaborate with each other. When you have incredible artists, helping them communicate can be the hardest part and that’s my sweet spot.”
Rhoades started her first company, Lion’s Share, at the age of 22 and remembers “a distinct feeling that no one was going to pull a seat up to the table” so she had to find her own niche. That ultimately ended up being in Nickelodeon and Disney Channel original movies. Rhoades partnered with actress Ashley Tisdale to grow the actress’ company Tisdale Blondie Girl productions and constructed a multiyear plan that began with the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon series and movies and then pivoted to include series for Bravo, E! and Freeform.
In 2014, Jason Blum hired Rhoades as Head of Television for his Blumhouse Productions banner, which was ramping up its TV portfolio. On her third day in the office, Blum said he wanted her to attend a meeting with him the next day with Noxon about Flynn’s book Sharp Objects that they had just optioned for TV. The next morning, she found herself face-to-face with Noxon.
“You take a calculated risk to change your stars,” she says. “This move to Blumhouse had its concessions because I had to shut down my company in order to work for him. And then, to have my first week at the company present me with the human being I’ve been yearning to work with my whole life, it was just an incredible experience.”
While at Blumhouse, she worked across HBO’s Emmy-winning The Jinx: The Life and Death of Robert Durst, Syfy’s Asension as well as Sharp Objects, the latter of which she ended up working on exclusively.
It was during this time that Pacesetter was being formed in her mind and Rhoades knew then that she wanted the company to make series television with a “high level of writer” and that would mean taking a “different producing approach.”
“You have to be lockstep producing partners with your showrunner,” Rhoades says. “You can’t be a separate entity. You have to be able to speak in any situation with the authority of what they would want.”
Looking ahead, Rhoades says she sees the UK production department at Pacesetter growing and they are planning on hiring a new exec in the U.S. team imminently. “I’ve been very careful my whole 10 years of having the company that I never wanted to scale just to scale,” she says. “That way I never had to reduce my staff during Covid or the strikes.”
A self-confessed workaholic, Rhoades says she’s enjoying the pace of the UK. “The work ethic is different here. People achieve as much in less time. People can live their lives, and it doesn’t take away from their passion and their commitment. To be able to build a real life around this craft that allows you to go to the pub and have a conversation with that friend of yours that reminds you of that time and that moment and all of a sudden that infuses your art – there’s a magic to it.”