We look for somebody who has a point of view that is distinct and interesting. They carry themselves in a way so their individual voices come through. When you look at Anthony Bourdain, Morgan Spurlock, Mike Rowe, Lisa Ling, John Walsh, they are who they are on screen. They have to be compelling and authentic in a way that makes the content cut through. When you pick a personality to lead one of these series, what do you look for? It seems like they all have to be a little larger than life. We have a library we can draw on that amortizes the cost that makes it worthwhile. You develop a library with many hours of content that CNN did not have, which we use to populate off-hours and run marathons. The money you pay at the beginning pays off in a lot of different ways. Our big question was not the money, it was, Will the audience get it? Will they understand that they can get their breaking news and they can also get something else? We were excited and surprised to see that they do. As you do that you see the audience is pretty accepting and flexible about this.
#The hunting ground cnn series#
We dipped our toe in with Anthony Bourdain and Morgan Spurlock and a handful of other series in the first year. We went in small steps, so we didn’t throw a huge amount of money at this. It’s pretty easy to control the cost of producing cable news in a studio. When you first announced this strategy, your competitors said it wouldn’t work as a business. We could still take great stories out in the world but tell them differently and devote money, airtime and resources to those stories that would make it clear that it was premium content. It had to be part of the CNN mission but had to be a different kind of experience and storytelling. The answer turned out to be content that would be high-quality, appointment television that would attract people to CNN in between those events. The question was: What can you do in between those big, compelling, overriding news events when CNN always does well? Royal wedding, you’re up and then it goes back down. You know what the ratings picture looks like: Arab Spring, you’re up here and then it goes all the way down. We had to develop content that sort of filled the voids and kept the audience at CNN in between those big events. The overarching idea was that CNN was in the breaking news business and there wasn’t always breaking news.
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Why was there a need for CNN to get deep into series and documentary programs?
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She’s replaced some of the talking heads in prime time with the cinematic storytelling of peripatetic chef Anthony Bourdain and whirlwind rides through “The Sixties” and “The Seventies,” courtesy of Tom Hanks’ Playtone Productions. Her first purchase, “Blackfish,” became a sensation and opened a national discussion about the conditions at a SeaWorld aquatic theme park.
#The hunting ground cnn tv#
So in 2012 CNN President Jeff Zucker enlisted Amy Entelis, a news executive who developed some of the top talent in the TV news business, to get the channel into original series and documentary programming. As TV viewers find ever more ways to consume information, CNN has discovered it’s tough for a cable news network to survive on news alone.