For their next chapter after launching, building and selling Jax Media to Imagine Entertainment, Tony Hernandez and Lilly Burns teamed with former MRC TV President Elise Henderson to start another independent production company, Counterpart.
That was a year ago. Staying under the radar with no official company announcements, the trio, joined by Jax/Imagine alum Sarah Madigan, spent the last 13 months building a slate, which includes four on-air series, dramas Dexter: Original Sin and Dexter: Resurrection for Paramount+/Showtime as well as comedy Free Bert for Netflix and darkly comedic thriller Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed for Apple TV+. All four are being shot in the U.S. — the Dexter series and Maximum Pleasure in New York and Free Bart in Atlanta.
All four came through outreach from platforms looking to utilize the company’s producing services. That had become a calling card for Hernandez and Burns, who became known for finding creative ways to produce high-end content — particularly comedy — at an attractive price point through Jax.
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With Counterpart, they are looking to go beyond that by originating, financing and producing television and film projects, which was behind the decision to partner with Henderson who at MRC TV oversaw such series as Ozark for Netflix, The Great for Hulu, The Terminal List for Amazon and Poker Face for Peacock. In a sluggish post-Peak TV marketplace, the company has taken three projects — two dramas and one comedy — and has sold all three as they tailor their business model to be able to work with every network and streamer.
The Counterpart team is developing projects internally, commissioning scripts as well as comedy proof-of-concept presentations that they hope would give their packages leg up over competitors in landing a sale — along with a production plan backed by the group’s expertise in making shows efficiently. Counterpart’s 13-min Earth To Percy, written, directed and starring Jeremy Beiler, had a world premiere in the indie episodic section of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. Its cast features big names like Amy Schumer, whose breakout show Inside Amy Schumer was produced by Jax, Josh Charles, Wyatt Cenac and Maya Rudolph.
In their first interview since launching Counterpart, CEO Hernandez, President Henderson, Chief Creative Officer Burns and COO Madigan talk about taking advantage of platforms’ increased push for lower budgets with their business model of cost-effective production as well as making four on-air series, actively developing and selling while many indie companies are struggling.
They explain where the name of the company comes from and how Counterpart is different from Jax. The quartet talk about self-financing, leaning into drama, ushering a new era of Peak TV and being able to film in the U.S. with A-list cast while keeping cost in check as they work closely with showrunners. They discuss comedy genre’s comeback and late-night’s demise, with the company determined to help up-and-coming comedy talent break through, crack the broadcast model and reinvent late-night.
From Jax to Counterpart
The story of Counterpart goes back to Hernandez and Burns’ previous; company, Jax, which the two launched about 14 years ago, built into a production services powerhouse on such comedy series as Emily In Paris, Russian Doll, The Conners, A Black Lady Sketch Show Younger, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, The Other Two, Broad City, Search Party and Difficult People before selling a majority stake to Imagine Entertainment in early 2019. Five years later, Imagine acquired the rest of Jax while Jax’s CEO Hernandez and CCO Burns left after serving as Imagine Presidents for a year, using their experience to launch Counterpart.
BURNS: We took everything that we learned there and are trying to build the better, smarter version of a lot of the same things that we did at Jax where we made a ton of different half hour comedies.
What we learned from making a lot of those types of shows, which were really creator-driven — and they were mostly on the low budget side — we learned two things. One is that a show does not have to have the biggest budget possible to be good. And also that if you build a system where that creator is in a position to make as many decisions across production, creative everything as humanly possible, you have a higher quality show at the end.
HERNANDEZ: And to make the decisions with the budget in mind. As an indie movie works, set up a system where the whole problem is the creator’s problem, and they’re dealing with it all as one big piece.
BURNS: That approach became central to our process. So even as Jax grew and we started to make bigger things, that was the central thesis for us. And after we sold Jax, we were ready to start a new chapter and take these things we learned and say, how can we build a bigger, better studio of the future?
Also looking at this landscape as everything, obviously, has changed a lot over those 14 years. And so that’s when we met Elise who has more traditional studio experience, but also a very independent edge from her time at MRC, and I think also had a very similar point of view of us to what makes great television really great, and how to build a company.
That’s how we hatched the plan for Counterpart. We believe that high quality and efficient production is the route to creative success, and so we built our studio on that thesis.
HERNANDEZ: I think the thing we’re best in class at is making cost effective, premium content. At Jax, we were making it when they called us to make it; it was an inbound business, it was producing services. And now with Elise, we are like, let’s weaponize that. Let’s not make somebody else’s show for 50 bucks. Let’s develop our own show. Let’s develop other people’s show. Let’s take IP from the networks that were like, Oh man, we’d love to figure out this riddle for 6 million bucks and work on it and do that for 100 bucks instead of 50 bucks. Let’s try to put the machine to work in a more proactive way.
We were big comedy people — and we still are at our souls — for Jax. We do a lot of dramas now. Three of our first four shows out of the gate for this company are dramas, including the Dexter universe of series that are out right now.
The industry right now wants and needs our expertise from Jax. So how do we do it on a bigger scale? We team up with Elise to develop and sell, and that’s half of it. And then also, let’s make dramas. Let’s make these $10 million dramas for $7 million and have that be a way.
HENDERSON: We all came together in a moment in time, so you have to think about what this company is in this moment in time. I think 14 or even 10 years ago, there was very much a need for this small, lower budget comedy. I think right now, everyone needs things to be at a price. It doesn’t mean that has to be cheap. It just means that it has to make sense for the platform.
I said this to Lilly and Tony when we first sat down: what they had built was more of a studio than 90% of the people out there that claim to be studios. They had the actual infrastructure to make shows, and what we want to do is take all of that and be incredibly strategic with how we build these shows and with every show — whether or not it’s something that we develop internally or something that someone brings to us — our goal is to think about how to build the best show that’s in conjunction with all of our partners.
Betting their own money
TV development is expensive, and Counterpart is doing that. But the founders opted not to raise capital for the new company, with Hernandez and Burns likely putting the money from the Jax sale to good use.
HERNANDEZ: We are currently self-financed. But it doesn’t sound that dramatic, because our inbound business makes us different than all these other studios. We have revenue from day one in these Dexter series and these Apple shows, they’re generating real revenue. So it’s not as crazy.
HENDERSON: it’s unique but it was one of the things that we thought was one of our superpowers of being able to have a lot of the ownership and the authorship by not having to necessarily look for outside financing, and to be able to just get going. That’s the other thing. The timeline is so long that for us to be able to have already been out to market with our first round to be in the process for our second round of things that we want to take to market, and we’re 13 months in; I think that’s been really important to us.
Counterpart’s pitch: script + production plan
While many producers rely on attaching big name above-the-line talent to their pitches to make them undeniable to buyers, Counterpart has a different approach to giving their packages the edge.
BURNS: Our general approach — and it’s not always this in terms of what we think of as a package in this market — and the thing that we’re excited to take out is an excellent script, whether it’s something that somebody wrote on spec that we’re buying or that we’re paying these great writers to write. And then what we take to market with that is an extensive plan for how we will make that show — not just the budget number, but the entire plan. We really believe that that is the package that is most appealing, that is maybe most likely to actually get that show over the edge in this current market, not just a great script, which is central, but the confidence to execute.
HERNANDEZ: Our business model now takes a script, our package is our expertise. Elise, Lilly, their great taste, which I think is best in class, followed by, we get to say, oh, and we can make that for $3.5M an ep, and we mean it. Every buyer knows we will; they all trust us. Our word is good. We felt like the thing to differentiate us and to push us along fastest as a studio — whatever that may mean these days — would be to have a script that we could sell with a good production plan.
BURNS: At this time where a lot of conversations are about how people are retreating and how people are being scared and how to be safe in the marketplace, we really wanted to bet on ourselves and bet on our capabilities, and be out there buying scripts and be out there taking projects out. We’re very excited about this model and our company and what we think we can pull off. And we really wanted to be specifically in this moment where people are retreating, running absolutely full speed ahead.
HENDERSON: The three things we’ve sold, we’ve sold to both streamers and to broadcast, which we think is also another thing that’s unique about us being a smaller studio/production company, is that we’re happy to sell to the place that makes the most sense for the show.
It also gives us just a wider breadth of places that we can sell in the marketplace. And I think they are shows that live within the ethos of what we talked about. Lilly said this the other day, they’re shows that we want to watch. They are entertainment forward, but they take a risk.
Another thing that we’re really excited about is that when you put the right number behind something, you allow your artist to take more risks and make that platform feel more comfortable, because you know that that risk-reward is appropriately balanced.
BURNS: We were just talking about that. Obviously the term Peak TV is overused but what is it that Peak TV was? It was a time where people had enough money to take creative risks, and so things were getting greenlit that might not have passed through in times of further scrutiny. What we hope to achieve is to say that we are bringing things in at the appropriate budget, or a budget that gives people the ability to take a deep breath, and we’ll be able to get some of those creative risks through, and it will feel like Peak TV, whatever that means.
Budget-conscious indie in a tough marketplace
Hernandez, Burns and Henderson launched Counterpart amid an industry contraction that has not been kind to independent companies. Counterpart’s inherent ability to produce premium content at a price likely helped get the company off the ground in an environment where studios and streamers are keenly focused on the bottom line.
HERNANDEZ: I think Wall Street runs our business right now. The price is being driven down everywhere. And the number one thing is — outside of HBO just announcing we’re going to go premium, but they’re going to go premium with a lot less quantity. Everybody is trying to bring the price down. So us having a record between Elise, Lilly and I of making premium stuff, we have tons and tons of shows or the 90%+ Rotten Tomatoes score, but being known to do a good budget or deliver on an efficient budget, I think that’s in vogue right now, and well received. And what everybody’s struggling to figure out. I don’t think anybody’s solved the riddle yet either.
I think everybody wants to bring the budget down from where we’re sitting, so they’re like, how do we make this thing we like cheaper instead of developing for the price point. I think they’re missing steps before that of looking at their analytics, seeing what works, seeing what their price point is, or their business plan, or whatever their marketing is, and then engaging creators and helping walk them to a $3.7 million hour, whatever it Is that works for whatever network you are. I think they’re just doing what they used to do and then being like, hey, can this be cheaper?
HENDERSON: That’s what we’re talking about with building things and being strategic and coming in earlier. But also, when we’re out there selling our things, one of the things is, when you are in a marketplace that is full of a lot of real and rational fear — and I understand why there is fear out there — one of the things that we think is an added value, that we are bringing is the confidence that we can make it for whatever number it is that we are talking about whatever it is that you need, and they feel that — both creatively and from production services side. That makes it easier for us. Not that anything is easy right now, but I think that eases us into the marketplace a little bit more.
BURNS: It’s not that we’re engineering television to hit a price, it’s that we’re finding things that we love, or writers that we love, or ideas that we’re excited about, or talent that we’re excited about, and we know that if we come in at that ground floor, we can build a show so that it hits the right price. And I think there’s a really big difference between those two things. The origin is still always what is the television show that we want to watch, that we love, but I just think that we have this ability when we get inside of a show to really get it where it needs to be without harming the creative process.
MADIGAN: It’s about spending where it matters and not spending where it doesn’t. Being an efficient producer means — and we run our company the same way we run our productions. That’s how you are smart about money, is you actually lean into spending where it matters like the way that we’re investing in scripts.
Making shows with big stars at a price — and in the U.S.
Hernandez and Burns made their mark at Jax with comedy series featuring up-and-coming talent, the vast majority of them shot in the U.S.. At a time when shows often head to Canada in search of better financials, all four of Counterpart’s current series are made in the U.S., including the two Dexter dramas, one of which, Dexter: Resurrection, has a star-studded cast led by Michael C. Hall, Uma Thurman and Peter Dinklage. And there is Emily In Paris, which has been filming in Paris — and now in Rome too. Hernandez, Burns and Henderson are evolving their model to allow for series to still be cost-efficient while crossing over to drama and filming in the U.S. with A-list talent.
HERNANDEZ: Our secret sauce is organic producing; it’s just being real producers that are on the ground the whole time. Dexter, for instance, that’s a piece of IP they [Showtime] knew what it was worth to them, what they wanted to spend on it. They knew Clyde Phillips is the showrunner. They introduced Clyde to us, and were like, All right, guys, you have X dollars, go nuts. And we were working with Clyde from hiring all the writers to deciding where we’re going to shoot it to deciding how big the Big Bad was gonna be so then he could know.
Original Sin was one Big Bad and then Resurrection, there was a bunch of different people that he wanted. So we wanted to slice and do offers differently, and go for different kinds of people. And we do one less shoot day per episode because we knew we were gonna have more stuff, so we wrote stuff differently.
It is no singular decision, which works for showrunners. We compare it to an indie movie a lot, because it’s just like, you raised 4 million bucks, so you got to make the $4 million version of your script. In the Dexter case, Clyde and Michael C. Hall raised a lot more than 4 million bucks, and so we just had to figure out what that meant and how they wanted to spend it and where it goes and that is producing. That isn’t just giving notes to a script or talking to the unions to help in that city — which we do sometimes too — but that is more figuring out the creative.
BURNS: And to Tony’s point, it’s not a template. It’s not like we go, Oh, here’s our thing. The reality is that our thing is that it’s entirely organic, and it’s entirely bespoke, and it’s entirely unique to each show and each show’s needs. And so in that one, knowing that there were going to be big star, we knew that from the beginning, so we engineered the show to have space for those types of level of A-list talent. Every single thing that we make has a different approach to it.
HERNANDEZ: It literally all boils down to the showrunner on those shows. When it’s a showrunner that is like, Oh man, I want to stay in New York and not go to Canada, I’m like, All right, here’s what we got to do. Let’s make this kind of deals. Let’s have the cast in three bangers instead of individual trailers. I need 20% of the shoot days on a stage. I need this kind of sandbox, whatever it is for the show, and then I can make New York work.
And that goes for LA, pre-tax incentives there. I was like, All right, well, we’re gonna leave $20 million off the table from some tax incentive state. So it needs to be XYZ, and you just figure it out in advance. It’s part of bringing us in early with the showrunner or creator that wants to check the boxes.
With Emily in Paris this year, Darren was like, I want a little bit in Rome, a lot in Rome, all in Paris, and we’ll go back to Rome at the end, or back to somewhere else at the end. And I was like, oh boy. Well, here’s some checkpoints that you have to do. Here’s a few bits of information. I need at least four eps here because if we’re gonna go there, we need to make it our worth, I need some locations be able to cheat it. We can’t go more than three days to some other country at the end, and it has to be at the very end. You make the budget and have a formula to give the writers room.
BURNS: I cannot underestimate the value on screen of shooting something in the city that it is scripted for. In the production plan, you might forget that somewhere at the beginning when they’re like, ooh, that Toronto number, Vancouver number looks good, but at the end, the money that goes on screen for stepping outside of the restaurant into Paris, stepping outside of the office into New York, it is how much it increases the value and the premium feel of that show that it being able to make it work adds millions and millions of dollars to the screen in terms of the way that it feels for the audience.
MADIGAN: And we don’t ever want that decision to have to be made for cost alone. That’s another area where we think smart producing sometimes means spending and sometimes means cutting, and always being smart about that, because so many of those decisions are made just to get to a budget number, whereas we’d much rather work with the creative to get to where it needs to be. And if we can be a force for good in terms of keeping productions in the US that should be in the US for all the reasons — obviously, Emily in Paris is a show whose DNA is in Paris, so that’s a different animal — but if we can be a force for good in terms of keeping shows in the US, and in places like New York and LA in particular, we want to do that.
HENDERSON: The other thing is that if we decide to shoot in some place because of a tax incentive, part of the smart production plan is to allow the scope of that location to shine through, so you can’t go to a place and just be on that stage and never utilize the places that you’ve been. I’ve definitely shot something in far eastern Europe, and literally, we green screened the whole thing. And at the end, we were like, Wait, why in God’s name did we shoot in this beautiful country that we green screened? You have to use it, and that’s something that I think our company is really good at.
Areas of production savings
Are there go-to areas in the production budget where Counterpart frequently finds ways to cut costs, like reducing the number or shooting days or opting for a financially adventitious location?
HERNANDEZ: It’s truly different based on the cast size to location count. Some creative wants to run all around the city, so we’re like, let’s go to that right city, shoot with a small team, run around the city, and have the amount of characters that can run all around the city. And some want an ensemble. So it’s like, let’s do fewer places. It’s truly different. And there’s certain markets where we can ask the unions to help us make a price work. There’s just different things to lean on everywhere, and, like I said, it’s truly organic. There’s no one way to skin the cat.
HENDERSON: But it does go back to that beginning, and all of us being involved early. I’ve watched Tony have this early conversation with a showrunner who said it’s really important to me to have more days to shoot, I need to be able to create tension, I need to be able to see this build and balance things that are on the comedic side with the tension.
When Tony hears that, and when we all hear that, every note that we give starts to be in service of giving them that ability to execute. I don’t fault anybody for not doing this, but I do think that it is a strategic decision to start at the very beginning and listen and hear what the show needs to be and what it needs to have in order to be the thing that everybody will be excited about. And then you direct money where it needs to go.
Relationship with showrunners
Hernandez and Burns have produced three series with Darren Star so far. They currently have two Dexter shows with Clyde Philips.
“Tony Hernandez and Lily Burns have been my secret sauce since we first collaborated on Younger ten years ago,” Star said. “From Emily in Paris to Uncoupled to whatever comes next — they bring my vision to life, in both production and post, with unparalleled taste and the most talented crew in the business.”
HERNANDEZ: Relationships with showrunners like Darren just come from making things safe with us. Counterpart works for both sides. Our company makes the writers feel protected and happy, and they get their vision across the finish line and feel great, and it makes the buyers happy, because we landed at the right price point. So I think we make both sides happy, but the writers that work for us, the best are ones that..
HENDERSON: That in this moment have a similar mindset to us, that they’re like, I see the opportunity, I see that I can do this, and I can go get my show on the air.
We love artists, and we love sitting with them. Lilly and I have lots of relationships, which we’ve been trying to trade on, and have done so. But it’s also about finding people that are enthusiastic. I think that the people that right now can see through the scary moment and say, I still think people really like television. Those are the people that have been so fun for us to dig in with. And that goes for both sides, whether it’s something that’s an incoming business, or whether it’s something we’re developing internally, those are the artists that we are seeking out, and I think that it’s been honestly fun, because they’re all tired of having the same scared meeting too.
BURNS: We’re also talking a lot about how to get things sold. But I think a lot of the magic of what we’re doing in terms of keeping those talented writers with us, or repeat relationships with the networks, is actually that when we finish the season, the writer-creator feels protected creatively. They feel like we had their back. The network is happy with what we delivered. We delivered it on budget, and everyone ends that process being like, Oh, I would do that again. And so for us, yes, we’re talking a lot about how to break through in the market and get things going. But I think that the real test of a company is like, Would you do another show with them? Would you come back? Would you bring your next idea? Would you call them, if you’re a network, for this next project? And I think, to me, that is truly where our strength lies, is that it’s not just the package and go, it’s the whole process, all the way through to the end.
HERNANDEZ: At our production meeting for our new show [Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed] today, we said, the company goal is to make a show that has a 90%+ Rotten Tomatoes score that also 100% of the crew wants to work on Season 2. You got to balance both of those things, and that’s by getting the scripts in shape for the budget and the show creatively still stays awesome, just a lot of producing.
Being everyone’s Counterpart
Counterpart’s inaugural slate is dominated by streaming/cable projects, with one broadcast sale. The quartet would not single out a platform — streaming vs. cable vs. broadcast — that’s the hardest to adapt the company’s model to.
BURNS: The way that we wanted to build this business is one that had as much functionality and ability to adapt to the different buyers as humanly possible. That flexibility is also built into the DNA of how we want to run this company. So for us, it’s just going in with this knowledge that each one of these deals that we make at these different types of buyers is going to look different.
HERNANDEZ: And I don’t think any of them are difficult now, given the pressure to bring prices down. When we started Jax, we were the darlings, and it was really great. We were making all this “it” TV. And then during Peak TV, they were like, Oh, you guys are cute. Get out of here with your cheap stuff. And then now everybody’s calling again, everybody needs it. Price is important again.
I think every company out there, every network, every streamer, has called us about a script at some point to help figure out, how could you guys slice this? How could we make that? We just want to be the studio that’s here to make your budget stuff and trying to be helpful in the back of the house to everybody while developing our own slate.
BURNS: We genuinely see ourselves as the ideal sister company to so many different types of companies, studios, networks. We think that we really plug in, in a truly organic and symbiotic way, to almost any other company, and Counterpart, where that comes from is this idea that we can really be good partners to our writers and to any of our other partners.
HENDERSON: I think that also, from a development standpoint, we are very much friendly to all platforms, we’re agnostic to that. That has been a thing that we have been really working to make sure that as we take new things to market, that we are continuing to increase the buyers that we have sold to, the places we’ve worked with.
Because our actual existence is a partnership to those places, not a replacement for. It’s an education process that obviously a lot of people already knew from Tony and Lilly in their earlier iteration, but it’s just about making everybody understand that in this marketplace, things are different. Let us help.
Cracking broadcast’s new paradigm
With The Conners ending its seven-season run on ABC earlier this year, Hernandez and Burns don’t have a broadcast series at the moment but that could change with one of Counterpart’s new projects in development being at a broadcast network. Can they make a broadcast show work financially?
HERNANDEZ: The funding of broadcast for me, for my bucket of this company, the price point they want comedies to be at is bananas low. I don’t think anybody’s gonna want to figure that out, except me — oh, sh*t, we can make some money here.
Anyway, broadcast is interesting to us because it’s having to rethink itself for survival, and so that’s an interesting playground. It’s an interesting place — Elise has been bringing us in a few meetings of developing in lanes for people who want this genre for their programming, and this is their new price point.
It’s like, oh, great. That’s not developing for a mandate, that’s not saying, we want a show that has kittens and old people in it. That’s saying, we need stuff at this price point that’s sci-fi or whatever, and that’s a good thing for us to deal with our writers. That’s not such a hole, it’s just a much more palatable creative writing project for them.
The current state of comedy
Comedy is where Hernandez and Burns made a name for themselves at Jax, producing a slew of acclaimed series. The genre went though a major pullback over a year or so ago. While buying has picked up a bit this year, the impact of the places that were breeding ground for up-and-coming comedy talent, such as Comedy Central, TBS, IFC, getting largely out of the original programming game continues to be felt. Despite the challenges, Counterpart is staying in the comedy space.
HERNANDEZ: Comedy’s coming back because everything’s cyclical. We need to laugh. And then also the price point that these people are talking about they want television in the future just doesn’t work for giant dramas. So I feel like the same Wall Street people I keep referencing are gonna be like, have you guys want to program some comedies, they look cheaper; I feel like that’ll play into it. It’s happening again, meaning people want to hear a pitch. And everyone just wants to laugh.
The breeding ground stuff is very real. So many of those Comedy Centrals that were designed to give people their first show aren’t there. And the streamers, we do know, are only hearing pitches and wanting to do the season vets. There’s just a lot less quantity.
BURNS: We’re really, really committed to comedy and breaking new comedic talent and all of the different things that we can do to ensure that that is still happening. Because it’s true. Without the IFCs and the Comedy Central, you just don’t get that thing of, let’s take a swing on this new person. And it’s important to us, we love it.
Those are the shows that end up breaking out and being special, so one of the things that we can do occasionally is actually shoot something. The first comedy that we sold, we shot a proof of concept for it. Because how else do you prove out an idea? A comedy pitch is just, I don’t know what it is, it’s nothing.
You have to show tone, you have to show talent, you have to show how it’s gonna look. You have to show how you’re gonna pull it off. And so I think that’s one thing that we have in our arsenal to help make comedies. And then the other is that — I’m just thinking about some of the things on our slate that we’ll be taking out, not the biggest comedy showrunners in the world, but the funniest thing you have read in a long time, and then a budget for us saying, just trust us.
We can do this for a number that you can handle and that your boss will be okay with. Just give it a life, give it some ability to breathe. Because comedy needs time and space to land, and so we are extremely committed to using all of our capabilities to make that happen.
HERNANDEZ: The next proof of concept we have slated to shoot is a New York comic who would have absolutely gotten a Comedy Central pilot back in the day, like 100%, whether they shot it or not, but they would have paid them to write a script based on his Instagram and comedy, no if, ands or buts. And I think there’s 15 of those people running around Brooklyn — two of them I can see out of my window right now — and they’re still funny, and they’re still wildly talented.
HENDERSON: The absence of those feeder places we see as a benefit to the company, not a detriment, because we get to go find those people, and we do have a unique ability to take that and give people the confidence to bet on them.
One of the things we talk about a lot is second seasons. We’ve said a lot about what it needs to cost and what it needs to be built to be part of that is so that when someone is sitting there looking at cold, hard numbers at the end of a 10-episode run, it makes sense, and you get the benefit of the doubt.
In what sometimes is a game of chance, we always want to give our artists the odds of success they need to get that second season. That’s been something we’re really aware of, especially on the comedy front, because Lilly is correct, there’s very few shows that right out of the gate you’re like, Well, that was the funniest show ever. You need the chemistry to build and breathe. And we’re excited about being able to give people that opportunity because of the way we build these shows.
HERNANDEZ: We’re also still doing comedy specials and like them because, taking the talent and the special is their baby, and helping them execute it, is what’s most fulfilling. We did Bert Kreischer’s last special for Netflix; we’re still out there and doing them, but spend most of the first year getting these Dexters and these two shows that we’re shooting right now off the ground.
Counterpart as a comedy Incubator
With Comedy Central, TBS and IFC no longer handing rising comedy talent their first break, is Counterpart looking to fill the vacuum by trying to develop new talent internally the way they used to?
HERNANDEZ: No, but a version of it. I also think people make their own stuff that looks a 100 times better than they did 10 years ago when Comedy Central is going nuts. So I feel like we can help them elevate it, help them go from a single joke to a full story with ad breaks and look and feel like a TV show in a lot of ways, and not just a big sketch.
BURNS: And we do we have this sort of unique ability to bet on the talent and bring something to these buyers that is much closer to the finish line, and therefore it gives it a better shot of actually getting made. It’s important to us to try to occupy at least a piece of that space.
Reinventing late-night
In light of CBS’ recent cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the fate of late-night is on everyone’s mind. Burns and Hernandez have experience in the genre having produced Full Frontal Samantha Bee and Desus & Mero. They share their views on whether late-night is dying and whether they are thinking about projects in that arena or is it really over.
HERNANDEZ: We’re thinking of a lot of stuff in that arena only because we are talent drives the idea-type of people, and we encounter people all the time we want to build a show with. I think that space as we know it is dead because broadcast having a time slot and all that stuff that those shows are geared towards is. But I don’t think taking somebody like Colbert and having him speak his voice on Netflix in some format that we don’t know yet, or P+, or wherever, is dead at all, and those things can be made at the price point that really works for content.
Authenticity sells, and these are real voices that you buy into. So I do think it’s just a riddle to be cracked on how it’s not so timely and there’s still a little evergreen, and what makes appointment viewing on streaming or broadcast lives long enough to rethink where these people go.
BURNS: I think that impulse to invite someone into your living room and to, again, talent-based, give that person a voice and give that person the space is definitely something that people still crave.
What Tony is saying is that we want to be at the forefront of figuring out if that is going to have to shift and change. We would like to help figure that out, because I do think that those voices are really important, whether they’re comedic or it’s political or whatever it is. People are still craving that kind of communication with a piece of talent, and so we’re ready to put our hand up and say, like, Okay, if it’s not working in that format, we can pitch you a new format to try to keep all of those things alive.
Being one of a kind
They say imitation is the sincerest form of battery but, as successful as Hernandez an Burns have been, no one has replicated their model with Jax and now Counterpart. Why is that?
MADIGAN: There’s so many production companies out there that have wonderful creative teams who can nurture relationships with the best talent and have the idea for a great project, but then it gets handed off to a studio production team. Whereas, because we are both amazing creative non-writing EPs and amazing physical producers, we’re actually able to build the DNA of the show that way. Regular production services companies just take a set of scripts that they’ve been handed and budget them. Whereas, because we’re involved from the genesis to the execution, we can impact that in a different way.
HENDERSON: What we do is hard, that’s the thing. And I will also say, for our current business model and where we are right now, there’s not as much of a need to replicate what we’re doing because the people that might potentially need to do that themselves come to us. Whether you’re a platform or a production company or an independent studio, there are ways that we can work with everyone, and we have the bandwidth to do so. So from that perspective, could there be somebody else who could try and replicate it? I’m sure. But I think that right now, people come to us, and that’s been both beneficial for our business and also just really fun, because you get to see all different entry points into the market and work with lots of different people.