TV creators Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson credit their decades-long friendship with helping them navigate the ever-changing waters of working on television.
After meeting on the set of the 1996 horror sensation “Scream,” the duo formed a creative symbiosis that spawned hit television franchises on broadcast TV, making them the kind of talent media companies can bet on even in uncertain times. That’s why as Hollywood continues to shrink, and their former home at the CW has pivoted away from youth-oriented dramas, the longtime collaborators kick off new solo chapters with the premiere of two series on different streaming platforms this week.
“It felt so symmetric,” Plec told TheWrap of premiering her Prime Video series “We Were Liars” one day before Williamson debuts “The Waterfront” on Netflix, after three decades of orbiting each other as industry friends and collaborators. “Now we’re both in the streaming space tackling elevated storytelling. It’s exciting to be going through that together, in a way.”
Having previously created the defining CW hit “The Vampire Diaries” together in the 2010s, the pressure to deliver compelling television that engages viewers looms in conversations with both Plec and Williamson. The streaming landscape is vastly different from the limited TV space of the CW, where “TVD” thrived for eight seasons, delivering hundreds of episodes and two spinoffs.
Although they are working independently now, the two also share a studio in Universal Television, where Plec and Williamson are both set with overall deals — a business partnership that is harder to come by in the post-peak TV era, but one the writers consider essential in moving through the new TV playing field.
“The one thing buyers are looking for is that showrunner who they know can come in and deliver on time, on budget and has a vision. That is so vital these days in the somewhat tightening landscape. Kevin and Julie have that on their resume in spades,” Universal Television president Erin Underhill told TheWrap.
“We Were Liars,” premiering Wednesday on Amazon’s Prime Video, is a TV adaptation of the 2014 bestselling novel by E. Lockhart, who serves as an executive producer on the series. Developed alongside Carina Adly Mackenzie — another alum of the “Vampire Diaries” era — the YA drama centers around Cadence Sinclair (Emily Alyn Lind) as she relives a traumatic summer alongside her privileged family in a private island manor near Martha’s Vineyard.
The show is following a successful formula for Prime Video in the scripted space that began with the adaptation of Jenny Han’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” which is set to wrap its three-season run later this summer. Should it hit with viewers, “Liars” could pick up the torch as another tentpole series in the young-adult space for the platform.
The first season is also a more straightforward approach to YA for Plec, who previously dove into the genre with a supernatural panache in various “Vampire Diaries” spinoffs and other standalone projects.
“I’ve watched her go through the process [of making the show], and my fingers are crossed that it is a huge success,” Williamson told TheWrap.
Williamson is also trying something new with his Netflix series “The Waterfront,” premiering Thursday. Filmed in Williamson’s home state of North Carolina, the family drama follows the Buckleys, led by Harlan (Holt McCallany) and Belle (Maria Bello), as they turn to a life of crime to preserve their business legacy in the small beach town they call home. At the center of the chaos is the relationship between Harlan and his son Cane (Jake Weary), a football star who gave up his dream to help keep the family business alive.
The project was loosely inspired by real-life events in Williamson’s childhood, when his father was caught running drugs on his fishing boat in the ’80s, as that industry collapsed in the East Coast. The eight-episode drama holds the grit of past Netflix hits like “Ozark,” mixed with the heart of Williamson fare like the WB hit “Dawson’s Creek,” which launched the careers of James Van der Beek, Joshua Jackson, Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams in the late ’90s.
It also marks Williamson’s TV return with a vengeance, as he works on seven other projects in development at Universal while putting the finishing touches on “Scream 7,” which he directed.
Embracing streaming
In leaving broadcast behind, Plec relished the flexibility that streaming offers, from not having to censor her “colorful” language to the less-constrained runtime of individual episodes.
“I have taken an incredible episode of television and made it 25% less incredible just by trying to get that extra minute or two out of it to meet a very firm running time on broadcast,” Plec said. “A lot of really, really terrific stuff ends up never seeing the light of day.”
Streaming also comes with newfound freedom during the production process. Since entire seasons tend to be filmed ahead of release, producers can focus on telling their story as they intended, without being influenced by its performance with viewers — as it used to be when broadcast shows’ fates were sealed by Nielsen same-day ratings.
“[On Amazon], I’ll never know how it’s doing unless they tell me,” she added. “It’s a completely different emotional roller coaster.”
Williamson found that production had become significantly more expensive since he had last created a show — the two-season fairytale horror anthology “Tell Me a Story” for CBS All Access in 2018. The reach also increased exponentially in collaborating with Netflix — “the biggest platform on Earth” — which he commended for developing a personalized workflow for creators and their executives.
“They make sure that within all their algorithms and tech branches that it’s still a very, very human experience,” Williamson said. “I’m not talking to a machine to make my show, I’m talking to an executive whose mother lived in Wilmington, North Carolina.”
Budgets also make a difference, though Plec noted that comparing financing for one eight-episode season of a streaming series to a 24-episode season on broadcast isn’t apples to apples. Without providing specifics, she said those numbers don’t differ as much as one might expect — reflecting the reality of higher costs across the industry.
“Whatever we can’t afford, we will just simply make up for it with beauty … You get creative and you figure it out,” Williamson added, while noting “The Waterfront” came in under budget in Season 1.
Is “Vampire Diaries”-level success possible?
How creators think about the longevity of their shows has also changed in the streaming era. Gone are the days when shows strived for six 24-episode seasons and a movie. Williamson said shows are now pitched as either eight-episode limited series with the potential to expand upon success, or a three-season arc which would total one season of “The Vampire Diaries.”
With that in mind, he doubts that any show can grow to the level of widespread phenomenon the CW vampire drama boasted during its run, unless it makes a splash from Episode 1.
“‘Stranger Things’ tells us that you can have a big cultural moment and a zeitgeist show. But I do think they’re fewer and far between, and they have to hit in a much bigger way than they used to,” Williamson said.
Plec paints a rosier picture, saying that there’s always room for a show to reach that level of success if the material is good — as long as networks put in the effort to market them correctly.
“I’ve been very energized by the enthusiasm for ‘We Were Liars,’” Plec said of the support she’s received from Prime Video and Universal ahead of release. “Whether or not one of my shows ever hit that level of success remains to be seen.”
“We Were Liars” premieres Wednesday on Prime Video. “The Waterfront” premieres Thursday on Netflix.
