Tech Brew Ride Home - (BNS) Susan Lyne Part 1
Episode Date: November 27, 2025I’ve maybe never interviewed anyone in my entire time as a historian and podcaster who has had a career as broad and varied as Susan Lyne. Yes, I obviously wanted to talk to Susan about her role hel...ping startup Gilt Group, and her current role as the managing partner of the VC firm BBG Ventures. But, holy how. Susan also launched and oversaw the golden era of Premiere Magazine. She was the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia when Martha had to step away to, you know, go to prison. And she was the President of ABC Entertainment. She oversaw the development of shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Lost. So, like, yeah. We needed to do two episodes. So this is part one, with the great, Susan Lyne. Chapters 00:00 From Boston to Berkeley: A Transformative Journey 08:00 The Rise of Alternative Media: Village Voice Era 16:06 Hollywood Calling: The IPC Films Experience 23:12 Launching Premier Magazine: Inside Hollywood 36:14 Navigating the ABC Landscape: A New Era 40:28 Developing Grey's Anatomy And Lost Takeaways Susan's upbringing in Boston shaped her perspective on expectations and identity. Her time at UC Berkeley was transformative, exposing her to diverse ideas. Freelancing in journalism helped her develop a passion for storytelling. Working at City Magazine under Francis Ford Coppola was a unique experience. The Village Voice was a golden era for alternative media in New York. Susan's transition to Hollywood was driven by her love for storytelling. Premier Magazine aimed to provide in-depth insights into the film industry. At ABC, she focused on creating shows that appealed to women. Susan learned the importance of having a supportive partner in leadership. Her experience at ABC taught her valuable lessons about resilience and change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
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The other one that I think was a really interesting process was Gray's Anatomy.
So Shonda had actually written a pilot script for us the year before that was about war correspondence, female war correspondents.
And the woman who was at the time my head of drama came in and said, okay, she wants to do a new medical drama,
something that will really feel different.
And it came in and it was incredibly well written.
It was an extraordinary piece of casting across the board.
But I think that she's continued to do that,
but that was the first time she got a chance to really show
that I can bring something genuinely new
to a show that I believe,
viewers are going to love.
Susan Lyon, thanks for coming on to talk to us today.
Happy to be here, Brian.
You grew up in Boston, right?
I did.
Boggs Standard Irish Catholic sort of Boston upbringing.
Yes, yes.
Well, yes.
Five children in five years.
I'm the oldest.
I never remember a time when I was not the big sister.
And my siblings are still the people I'm closest to in the world.
So we actually all got together last weekend for a reunion, which we try to do at least, you know, once or twice a year, just us.
And then obviously we see each other with our kids and grandchildren now as often as we can.
Well, I started with that because you go to college at UC Berkeley right in the classic late 60s.
When UC Berkeley was UC Berkeley.
Yeah.
The UC Berkeley that we think of.
So coming from that background to the height of Summer of Love, Pippies, UC Berkeley was there.
I actually went out there in 1970.
Mm.
But you are 100% percent.
right. It was transformational for me because my parents were maybe the only Irish Catholic
Republicans in the city of Boston. So I came from a really conservative background. And
one of the reasons that going out to California really appealed to me was that I always felt
in Boston that I had some member of the line clan.
was going to be there and that there were expectations of me to be X.
So going out to Berkeley was a way to define or at least explore who and what I wanted to be and do.
It was an amazing time.
It was the height of the anti-war movement, was the beginnings of the women's movement,
sprawl Plaza, you would see.
Palestinian Students Union, you would see the Iranian Students Union, you would see religious
groups, you would see, I mean, it was just as extraordinary, I won't even call it a melting
pot because it was more, it was like a marketplace, right? Lots of people who were competing for your
interest and your alliance. So I correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that you left
before graduating to pursue a newsroom job.
And so many people in the last few weeks that I've been interviewing
got their start as journalists and have said that that sort of trained them
to be sort of omni-interested and so then they could do several different career fields.
Like, do anything?
What do you think, before we get into the paper itself,
like training as a journalist, what did that do for?
for you and your career?
Well, the first thing I will say is I never trained as a journalist, but I did freelance as a
fact checker and a copy editor when I was in school.
And I wrote for the Berkeley Tribe, which was the underground newspaper.
And I knew that I wanted to go into journalism.
I actually wanted to go into magazines.
because this is pre-etronet, right?
So if you wanted to impact the way people thought about something or be part of the conversation,
that's where you went, right?
There was no better place to go if you wanted to both be a lifelong learner and also
be part of the conversation.
And you worked, I did not know this, but Francis Ford Coppola had a weekly,
called the city or city.
City. And what was that like? I get the impression that it was sort of like understaffed and like,
hey, just make it up as you go a lawyer or whatever. But what was Francis Ford Coupa's paper like?
So he had this idea that there should be a West Coast version of New York Magazine, right?
that New York was kind of the representative entity of that side of the world,
and that San Francisco was so different that we really needed to represent.
It was a Rolling Stone format in that, you know, it was oversized.
It was funky paper that actually cost a lot of money,
but the idea was to look informal
and to look more like alternative publications
than a Time Inc magazine might.
And he had, this was after Godfather 2
and before Apocalypse now.
So he was probably 30, 31, 32,
and he had bought a block in Canary Row in San Francisco
So all these great old buildings.
And he put Zoetrope, which was his production company, into one.
Each one had its own purpose.
And then he had City Magazine, which, as you said, under there were not enough people for the number of jobs there.
I actually talked my way into a job as the assistant to the editor-in-chief, who was a guy named Warren Hinkle, who was a guy named Warren Hinkle, who was
a well-known magazine editor who had done ramparts and then a magazine called Scanlans.
But he was a force in the city, great rock on tour, great drinker.
I mean, part of my job was to find him in one of six North Beach bars and take down his
letter to the editor every week.
But he was a beautiful writer.
And he had a good instinct for stories.
And he created a culture there that allowed someone like me to throw out ideas and to ultimately become, I think I was an associate editor before they actually shut the magazine down.
And it was shut down literally an hour after his plane took off to go to Asia to shoot Apocalypse Now.
And his business manner, I think, had been counting down the days till he could actually shudder it because it was losing a lot of money.
But it was really fun.
And it was reinforcement to me that being at a magazine was exactly what I wanted to do.
I liked the way that magazines are put together.
I liked the collegiality of it.
I liked the fact that, you know, you would get into a room together and you would.
brainstorm ideas and then you would brainstorm who the great writer was, who would be perfect
to do this.
Well, it's just a great, it was much more interesting to me than, I mean, certainly going to
finance or to some of the other arenas that some of my friends decided to go to.
Now you move back to the East Coast and come to New York.
Is this the late 70s?
Yeah, 1978 was when I moved back.
When city shut down, I was doing a story for New Times,
which was a bi-weekly feature news magazine.
Great writers.
It was just a great publication that was too short-lived.
At a certain point, the editor-in-chief, John Larson,
asked me if I would come back to be managing editor.
And I said, I don't know how to be a managing editor.
And he said, it's going to be fine.
I know you can do this.
So two weeks, I packed everything up.
I got into a car.
I drove across country.
I had multiple friends who had moved back to New York a year earlier.
because Rolling Stone moved from San Francisco to New York.
Oh, that's right.
I called them, asked them if they knew about any sublets.
And I ended up subletting an amazing half a townhouse from Tom Powers,
who was a New York Times reporter,
who he and his wife and kids lived in this crate at two floors of a townhouse
at 25 West 10th Street.
which is now probably worth $20 million.
But at the time, he was moving up to Vermont for a year to write a book about the weather underground.
And I got to live there for $400 a month.
So it was a great entry into New York City.
New Times folded about a year later.
and I went to the Village Voice.
When Rupert had bought the voice as part of his acquisition of New York Magazine,
he hated the voice.
He brought a new editor-in-chief in,
and when the announcement that New Times was folding came out,
that new editor called me and said,
hey, I hear you don't have a job anymore.
Do you want to come and be my managing editor?
So I went down to the Village Voice,
and I was there for four years as the managing editor.
I, again, I'm talking about eras.
I feel like that is one of the golden eras of the Village Voice,
the CBGB era, the New York and the Blackout era.
Give me a sense of what it was like to do media
or even just live in New York City at that?
You know, I had two sisters living here already.
So they, I've been back to the city to visit multiple times.
When you're in your mid-20s and you're in a city as exciting as New York,
you don't really think a whole lot about, well, the garbage isn't being collected as often as it should be.
or there's crime.
It was a very affordable city at that point.
You know,
I think about what the challenges are now
for someone who was my age coming into New York
was the capital of the world.
And yet I could get a sublet for $400 a month.
And I was living on, I think my salary at the Village Voice
was $27,000 or $27,000 a year.
And that was big money for me.
That was after having been paid, I think, $18,000 a year when I was at New Times.
So, you know, you could live on the salary you were making at an alternative newspaper.
The voice was extraordinary.
Some of the best writers I've ever met in my life were at the paper at that point.
And not just young writers.
You know, these were people, Nat Hentoff and Jack Neufield.
and a lot of the back of the book editors who were extraordinary, Bob Criscoe, I mean, I could go on about people who were extraordinary writers and were kind of leading figures in some part of the New York City scene who I got to see every day and and fight with every day.
You get into sort of the Hollywood side of media shortly after this with, what is it, IPC
films?
What was IPC films?
It's a part of my resume that I don't highlight often.
I admire Jane Fonda more than almost anyone.
Jane Fonda and someone I had gone to school with Bruce Gilbert had.
started what was called IPC films. This was after she came back from France. She had done clout.
She had done coming home. That was, I think, the first movie that IPC films produced.
So it was coming home and then China Syndrome, then nine to five. And we were selling a fair number
of village voice stories to Hollywood.
There were a lot of good writers who were doing feature reporting
and lots of incredible storytelling.
In fact, Teresa Carpenter won us the Pulitzer Prize
for feature reporting with a story about the murder
of Dorothy Stratton, who was the playmate killed
by a very jealous boyfriend.
But I thought, okay, this is applicable.
What I've been doing, I understand storytelling,
and they asked me if I wanted to come
and be a development person.
So come up with stories and see if we could develop them into scripts.
And I spent a couple of years doing it,
and I really disliked it.
So love her.
love Bruce too.
I mean, they were
great people to work with.
But the process
of making movies
is it's not just a lot of nose.
It's a lot of hurry up and wait.
And I was used to
being able to
put together a magazine
or a newspaper in a week and to
get it out there and get feedback on it
and have people send me new ideas.
And I love that relationship between an editor and a reader.
It's what fueled me for a lot of years in journalism.
And you don't get that in the movie industry.
You know, you're really developing something for a long time.
And then you make it and it gets put out there.
And either they like it or they don't.
But there isn't that relationship between the creator and the viewer that I was used to.
So I decided to go back to magazines.
And I pitched a magazine about the movies.
I had spent enough time in that world that I thought there's actually an interesting magazine to be done here because
it is kind of a small town, right?
So the idea was could we do Rolling Stone for the movies, right?
Could we make these characters, not just actors,
but the people who were producing movies, directing movies, making movies,
and the people who were paying for them,
could we tell those stories and could we give people a sense of how they all
interacted with each other?
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let me can i interrupt to give context here because i'm old enough to remember premier magazine um it was not
by the way it launches in like 87 you you you help launch it uh edit it um what premier magazine did it wasn't just
okay, this movie is coming out, so let's have a puff piece with the star.
It would be in-depth articles and reporting about how the movie was developed.
And also, like, the through line of, well, you know, this director has had a couple of bad movies,
and so they need this as a comeback.
It was very inside baseball sort of stuff.
It was the stuff that I like to do, like behind-the-scenes stuff.
So I just want to put that in context for people that might not be old enough to know it.
No, you're 100% right.
And that was clearly what excited me, too.
And we sort of laid this out as a,
here's who we are in the first issue,
because we did a couple of stories in that issue
that were very different from what you would typically see.
So we did one that was about Dragnet,
the Kevin Costner movie that we called Shot by Shot.
And it was the great Brian DePama scene.
Not Dragnet, the one that Sean Connery won the Academy Award for.
Right.
Not Dragnet.
You're absolutely right.
I'll look it up.
Keep going.
Yeah.
Okay.
But it was about that scene where the baby carriage goes down the stairs and, you know,
it's not clear what's going to happen.
And so what we did was create a format called shot by shot that was an interview with the director,
really trying to figure out not only how they did it, but why they did it the way they did.
And it was very visual and it was a fun read.
And at the time it was also, we couldn't get movie stars to talk to us for that first issue.
So we talked to the other people who were willing to.
to really go deep with us.
And in that case, it was Brian De Palma.
And we did another story about Beverly Hills Cop 2 that started with the screening of the first
Beverly Hills Cop.
And at the end of the screening, the studio said, we got to do a sequel.
So it was kind of the blow-by-blow of creating the second one of these movies.
And what I think these really said to people was, first of all, this is beautiful.
It's great to look at.
But we're going to get, as you said, inside baseball about this industry.
By the way, the movie was The Untouchables, the De Palma movie, yes.
Great movie.
Okay.
But I'm curious about that.
Like, your premieres like treating Hollywood as a beat, but both you're getting access.
but you're also having rigor and you're being critical about it. So like how did you balance the
relationships with candor like if you're going to ruffle feathers by telling the truth?
I will say, sorry.
No worries.
I'll leave you some air so that you can get rid of that.
It was always a balancing act. So there was never an issue that came out where I didn't get
an angry call from somebody about a story about where they landed on our power list.
And in not a few cases, you know, real threats that they were going to sue us.
They were going to go after Rupert because this was News Corp that backed it.
but we also clearly adored movies and movie making and there was enough in it that was really celebratory
that most of the community loved it so the fact that someone was incredibly pissed off at us
because of something that Kim Masters had written or another great reporter
we were still beloved by enough of the industry that we continue to have access.
And I think that at least half the job of an editor-in-chief was at that time, and hopefully, still is,
was to protect reporters and writers to really tell the stories that are going to be meaningful to people.
And to be cautious enough that you don't do something that gets you sued and put out of business.
But your job on a day-to-day basis is to take the hits on their behalf and
Keep moving forward.
I did a lot of watches with people who were furious with us.
And I would say at the end of a call,
hey, I'm coming out to California on X-State.
Let's sit down in Africa or let's get together.
And that actually often was the way that we were able to get through something like that.
I'm going to straight up say that you were in charge for the golden era of that magazine,
of a type of magazine that just that sort of thing doesn't exist anymore.
So it's amazing.
But in the in the mid 90s, Disney recruits you.
Now you had said that you didn't like like the making movies thing a couple of minutes ago.
So why at that point did what was the pitch that?
convinced you to go to a studio?
Well, I'll say a couple of things.
Joe Roth, who ran the Disney studio,
had been talking to me for a while about,
hey, you should come work here.
And I didn't really think much about it
until our magazine got sold to Hachette,
which at the time was run by David Pecker.
And it was really clear to me very fast
that we were going to have a very different owner
who believed in getting access
by giving people the right to censor X or Y.
And I said I wasn't going to work for him.
So at that moment,
I was much more open to doing something new.
And I loved Disney.
I mean, I truly loved the company at that point.
And I thought they had very interesting assets as well.
So what I realized pretty quickly was that while I didn't love movies, television was much more like magazines.
It was something where you did have a relationship with that viewer, right?
It wasn't something where you put out something once and it was gone and you went on to the next thing.
But there were series.
There were ways that you were constantly interacting with that person you were creating for.
Like ratings as feedback, essentially, from the audience.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And that's very true because there was still no, you know, there was a nascent social media at that moment.
There were chat rooms, but you certainly didn't have the kind of instant feedback that we had soon after.
So I jumped.
I spent about a year and a half in development, which, you know, again, was not going to ever be my dream job.
But then Bob Eiger, who had come to Disney through the acquisition of ABC, said, you should go work at ABC.
and I took a job that I was completely unprepared for, but with a good team doing movies and miniseries.
So I ran what was called Longform at the time when networks were doing 20, 25 movies a year.
And it was really fun.
It was there was kind of enough of a variety.
of things to work on that it didn't feel like that desert that happens in feature film development
and I liked a lot of the team there I certainly weighed in on on series as well and
we did a good job with the movies we put out we got a lot of good ratings and we won a lot of
Emmys. And in 2002,
according to my notes, 2002, yes.
2002, I was given the job of running prime time.
It's the present entertainment.
At ABC.
Yes.
I'm going to interrupt you because I believe at the time that you do this, ABC is sort of in like a rating slump.
We were the lowest rated network.
out there.
Some of the shows that come out of this period, developmental-wise, are shows like Lost,
Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, you're nurturing, we're expanding the Bachelor franchise.
I'm going to ask a weird question that'll pay off when we get to your investing.
Is working with creators, is there some sort of similarity to working with founders?
Yes, absolutely.
And I would say it's there's something similar also to working with good writers and good journalists, right?
Where you're trying to identify talent, first of all. You're trying to identify and assess whether someone has the, not just the skills, but the drive to be very successful in this.
and that's what I've always liked best, right?
It's working with a writer, working with an editor
who's trying to figure out how to create a new part of the magazine.
In this case, writers who were imagining some new piece of storytelling,
I will tell you, in the old days,
when I was at the network, we still had pilot season, right?
So it was a three, four month period of time where you met with hundreds of writers.
You picked up probably, I don't know, in our case, we picked up way more than other networks
because we had a lot of holes, but you pick up a lot of pilots, right?
written pilots. So that's the first stage. And those come in and you all get together and you
kind of assess what do we think is really great. And from that, you decide which ones you're going to
actually make. And you cast them. You get a good director, hopefully. And then you screen them. And this all
takes place in a very short period of time. So, you know, the kind of excitement that comes from
that cycle of putting out a magazine, very, very similar. And I loved it.
Can you give, give me your favorite story in terms of one of those pitches, like lost or
desperate housewise or crazy, when you know you're hearing the pitch and you're like, this,
this is going to work.
I like this.
So I'll tell you two stories, right?
With Lost, and this was my boss at the time, but really my partner, too, Lloyd Braun,
who I can't remember exactly what his title was, but he oversaw both the network and the TV studio.
and we had done an offsite where we just brainstormed ideas.
And Lloyd, when it was his turn, said,
I think we should do Castaway with a big plane, right?
Because the Tom Hanks movie had just come out Castaway, yes.
Yeah.
And he said, you know, what's interesting here is what happens to the kind of
social norms when the guy from Goldman Sachs is completely useless, but the guy who ran a construction
company is actually gold. And it was a cool idea, and we told a bunch of agents about it, and we got a
bunch of pitches in. It, the script came in for the pilot, and it was, eh, not very good. So,
we were going to kill it and Lloyd said, give me the weekend. I just want to see whether I can get
JJ Abrams excited about this. And JJ came in early the next week. He said there's no way that I'm
going to be able to write a full script in time for you to make a decision. I'll write the first act
and I'll write an outline. And it came in and it was great.
And we ended up greenlighting the pilot based on an outline and a first act.
And I will say my biggest input to that pilot was in the first draft,
JJ killed off the doctor at the end of Act 1.
And he did it because he wanted to signal that this was not going to be a series like all the ones you saw where, you know, the handsome, cool lead was always going to be rescued.
And in principle, that sounded great, but I said to him, I promise you, 10 million women have just turned off the television.
So he lived and JJ ended up killing off somebody else in that first episode.
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The other one that I think was a really interesting process was Gray's Anatomy.
So Shonda had actually written a pilot script for us the year before that was about,
war correspondence, female war correspondence.
That was a great piece of writing.
But it was hard to see how it was going to work as a series
because it was four women who were in different parts of the world.
But we liked her enough that we wanted to see
if we get her to do something else the following year.
And the woman who was at the time,
my head of drama came in and said, okay, she wants to do a new medical drama, something that
will really feel different. And it came in and it was incredibly well written. And, you know,
it had all the elements you would want to see in a pilot script. But it was somewhat traditional.
you know, all the beats were there.
It was the rookie residence and the tough, tough boss and the doctor who she had inadvertently slept with
and now was going to be a problem for her going forward.
But then we got to casting.
she brought in actors for every single one of these roles that looked completely different than the other actors who were there for that role.
So I think colorblind casting has gone way out of style, but she did something different.
It was really saying that this is going to be a show where, um,
where diversity in every sense is so much at the center of it that you don't even think about it.
And it was an extraordinary piece of casting across the board.
But I think that she's continued to do that, but that was the first time she got a chance to really show that
I can bring something genuinely new to a show that I believe viewers are going to love.
How do you protect, and this is almost a question, again, akin to protecting startups and founders?
How do you protect like those weird or ambitious shows through development when there's pressure from executives that are skeptical or it's testing badly or whatever?
Like what tactic did you use to see the vision through that you believed in?
I had a really great partner in Lloyd.
So he was my titular boss, but we worked in offices across the hall from each other.
And he was, we really linked arms.
And he, if I had to go meet with Michael Eisner about a show that he hated,
Lloyd would often actually come along.
And I learned a lot from him about not fighting for what you believe is going to work.
But additionally, not asking permission.
So we picked up shows that we believed at the end of the day was our decision what shows we picked up.
And Michael would put his input in, Bob would put his input in, but we picked up the shows.
And having somebody who I felt would go shoulder to shoulder with me was incredibly valuable.
I've always liked having a good partner.
And I will say that he made that job not just fun, but also very possible to do in a way that colored outside the lines.
Because the other thing, that last season where we picked up both Gray's Anatomy and,
and Desperate Housewives,
I had gone into the season with the idea that we're going to try to find the next great girl show
because every network was programming for men.
And it was largely because there was some unwritten rule that women would watch a show made for men,
but men wouldn't watch a show made for women.
So everyone was chasing CSI and Law and Order and, you know, lots of procedural shows that were often good,
but none of the Sex in the City and Ali McBeal and, you know, all the shows that women used to get together to watch or used to chat about the next day were off the air.
So felt like there was a big opportunity there if we could find appointment television for women.
And, you know, that was not something that was high on Lloyd's list of things he wanted to get done, but he backed me a thousand percent.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think that I wouldn't have stayed if I didn't feel like I could do, I could pick up.
the things I thought were right. You were let go in 2004 before a lot of those shows even
premiered. And we should point out, changed ABC's fortunes. And one could argue, kicked off
like the sort of golden era of television, you know, and long story short. I'm curious,
number one, how you process that moment, like professionally and personally, but also,
So how did that experience, oh, look at the success we had, but I'm not here anymore to share in the success.
How did that change how you lead as a leader?
It's a really good question.
Well, first of all, I was blindsided by it.
Lloyd had been fired by Eisner.
They got into a real battle over lost.
Eisner hated lost.
It was the most expensive pilot that was ever made.
And Lloyd became the ball guy for it.
And so when that happened, Bob said to me,
you're good.
Don't worry.
Love what you're doing.
I want to give you more.
Just give me a couple of weeks to figure out what this is going to look like.
and I accepted that assumed it was all going to work out.
And there were a couple of guys who were direct reports of Lloyds who went to Bob and said,
we're not going to report to her.
And I knew they were doing some version of that, and I didn't fight back.
I think that I had this assumption from past experience that, you know, you do good work, you're going to be protected.
And so I should have gone hard and fast at the two of them.
one of them ended up taking that present entertainment job
and was ushered out five years later under a major cloud.
And there is literally nothing that he put on the air during that period of time
except dancing with the stars that lasted.
But there is still, or there certainly was then, a boys club in television
as there is in a lot of industries.
He had a lot of good pals in the business
who I think helped him to get Bob to decide to back him.
But it was horrible.
It's the only job I've ever had where I didn't get to finish it, right?
And you talked about my not being there when those shows launched.
I was let go two weeks before the upfronts, which is when we announced the schedule every year.
And, you know, even knowing the upf fronts were taking place at Radio City Musical or wherever they did it that year,
and I was a couple of miles away and not part of it was horrible.
You know, I think that I've gotten probably more credit for the shows I picked up
because I had a lot of friends who were journalists and who thought that I had been treated really badly.
So the history books do tell the story.
But it was, it took time for me to get over that.
Let me end this first conversation.
with this. I'm going to put this to you, but I believe it deeply. I think that Lost especially
the era of fandom and the way that there's podcasts about every episode, there's subreddits about
it. Lost was the first sort of fandom that you couldn't have Game of Thrones if Lost. Lost Walk so
Game of Thrones could run. Did you have any sense of that or what was special about that show now in
retrospect, that was the thing that sort of trained people to be the sort of fans that they are today.
Yeah. So I think that's a really great observation, and I will tell you one thing, which is that
JJ spent the summer between season one and season two in chat rooms. He went in there. He created
conversations. He answered questions. He got people excited about characters and what was happening. He gave him a little
bit of a hint of what was going to be coming in season two. And he was really a key driver
of that excitement. It was a great show and people loved it, but the kind of buzz around it and
the, as you say, the online fandom piece of it was really something that he understood
very early, and he participated in, and I would say accelerated,
so that when it came back, and you should look up what the ratings were for the first season,
and then what the ratings were when it came back for season two, it was a big bump,
and the network couldn't figure it out, right?
They didn't know why this was happening, but it was all because,
JJ understood that these platforms, these early social platforms,
were going to be key to getting people to watch.
Well, and allowed a different kind of fandom where the show doesn't just air,
the show airs and you dissect it and you talk about it.
And that's the metabolism of media today.
Yeah.
And by the way, I would say Shonda took note.
of all of that, and she went hard and fast at the same thing, creating viewing parties,
doing a lot of fan Q&A between episodes. Yeah, I mean, they were early practitioners,
and I think really helped to drive that shift.
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