The Televerse will return. That’s the promise from Television Academy president/CEO Maury McIntyre, who said the org is already looking at ways to improve on last week’s inaugural event and eventually make it profitable.
“We wanted to test the waters the first year,” McIntyre told Variety on Saturday, as the three-day TV festival was winding up. McIntyre said the fest attracted around 3,000 attendees — with approximately 75% consisting of TV Academy members, and the other 25% from the general public.
“It’s really something that makes us feel like we have tapped into something that people really are interested in, and that it bodes well for the future,” he said.
The idea of a TV Academy-led festival has been years in the making, first under previous chairman Frank Scherma and now pushed forward by current chairman Cris Abrego. But original plans to pilot the idea in 2020 and 2023 were stymied by the pandemic and then the Hollywood strikes. Originally, the focus was to be less Emmy-centric and more focused on new and upcoming series. Under that plan, the festival would take place during the week between the Creative Arts Emmys and the Primetime Emmys telecast.
But after the industry balked at that idea (that’s already a jampacked week), the TV Academy decided to lean into Phase 2 FYC events, and make Emmy campaigning — at least this year — the backbone of launching Televerse. Ultimately, the org charged networks/studios $10,000 per hour for FYC sessions — which included panels for shows like “The Pitt,” “Severance,” “The Studio,” “Abbott Elementary,” “Slow Horses” and “Top Chef,” among others. Nominated shows that couldn’t front a panel were still given the option to screen an episode.
The Academy still wanted to supplement those FYC events with other offerings. That’s why the staff behind ATX TV Festival (led by Emily Gipson and Caitlin McFarland) were hired to organize TV reunion panels (“Bones,” “Queer as Folk”) as well as industry-centric discussions on topics such as diversity, filming in L.A. and the impact of AI on the business. Also in the mix were a handful of premieres (“The Rainmaker”) and masterclasses from the likes of Henry Winkler and Beau Willimon. The fest ended on Saturday night with the TV Academy’s annual Hall of Fame celebration.
Ultimately, this year’s Televerse wound up much bigger than McIntyre and team had originally envisioned for Year 1. “We were thinking we’d only do a few panels,” McIntyre said. “We ended up with 40 sessions, all told, this time.”
For studios/networks, adding Televerse to their calendars posed some challenges, especially since it was a great unknown. How many people were going to show up? What would the experience feel like? How useful would the panels be? McIntyre said this year’s Televerse was a bit of a proof of concept, and he hopes to see even more industry buy-in as everyone regroups and discusses next year’s event.
“When we first announced this with our partners, they were very excited about it,” he said. “They loved the idea of possibly doing the FYCs. We kept having those conversations, and we all thought this was great. And then it became a reality, and it became much harder. Our studio and network partners have supported us through this in a remarkable way. I certainly think there have been challenges along the way as we really moved forward with this, and that will be something we talk a lot about for next year. How do we make sure that all of us can do something like this in a way that works for the industry, that doesn’t overwhelm the industry in any way — and that’s both on the Academy side and with our partners.”
The Television Academy produced this year’s Televerse as a loss, but McIntyre said that was to be expected.
“We knew this was going to be an investment,” he said. “The way we put our business plan together, we’re expecting it to be investment for the first couple of years. Part of this was proving that we can actually build the infrastructure, we can put together the programming that will work, we can attract an audience at least. Once we’ve got that, it’s going to be much easier, we feel, next year to sell more sponsorships. We’ll be able to attract more of an audience now that they’ve heard about it, and they know what it is… We’re going to bring in what we expected to in this first year, knowing it was not going to cover costs necessarily. It was not intended to, but we expect that that will improve over the next couple of years.”
Will the TV Academy have the patience to give Televerse time before it starts generating meaningful revenue for the org? “I can’t answer that question yet, because clearly this is not my decision,” McIntyre said. “We’re going to have a many a conversation at the board level about, how did this go? How did the board feel about it. Did it achieve the aims of the board? Did they feel it was success? What would success look like for them in the future? If I was giving you my gut based of what I’ve heard, they all seem very pleased with it. I think that they certainly would be interested in continuing, at least to try again and see what more we can do with it in years two or three. Beyond that, it’s really hard for me to say.”
Here’s Variety’s conversation with McIntyre, edited for length and clarity.
What are some of your immediate takeaways from Televerse Year 1?
We’ve heard a lot of great positive feedback from all the attendees here. I would say one of the things I’m most surprised about is how much we got the public this year. We were really focusing on our members, but many of these panels outside of the FYC are all driven by the public.
A lot more TV fans than you were expecting?
I wouldn’t say it was more than we were expecting, but it was not necessarily our focus in this year. This first year, we had this whole idea of a ‘crawl, then walk, then run’ scenario. We wanted to test the waters the first year. We thought our main audience would be the members, specifically because of the FYCs. And in our ‘crawl’ philosophy, we were thinking we’d only do a few panels. We ended up with 40 sessions all told, 20 of them not FYC-related, and those have primarily been the public coming. We had a cinematographer pane;, it was full. Our casting director panel was full. That’s the general public, very interested in these disciplines.
And in that case, when it’s general public, that’s revenue for the Academy, right?
Which is another idea of why we’re doing Televerse. It’s looking for us to diversify our revenue streams.
What’s been the ratio between TV Academy membership versus public?
I think we’re probably still at about 75% members, 25% public. Only because of the FYCs. The FYCs have been in much larger rooms, and that was by design. We knew we were going to get a huge amount of interest around all of our Emmy-nominated programs, and a lot of talent up there. It’s the first time we’ve ever had officially-sanctioned second round FYCs. We’ve always kind of turned a blind eye and let our partners do what they wanted to — they just couldn’t specifically target members for invites. This is the first time we have actually done an official invite to our members to come see [Phase 2] panels about these nominated programs.
You mentioned the crawl/walk/run scenario. A lot of people have said feels like you immediately went to “run.”
We did not stick necessarily with crawl. As we were building the schedule, we didn’t quite realize how many sessions we were going to end up with, once we added the FYC. In a traditional panel conference, you’re going to have certain tracks in certain rooms. You suddenly add two more rooms with their own 20 panels, and that’s just a lot more programming. When we went into this, I was like, ‘we’re going to be successful if we have 1500 people show up.’ But when you’ve got six rooms, 1500 people suddenly is dispersed way too quickly. We are lucky. I think we were approaching, and I don’t know the exact number, 3000 total attendees. Which for a first year is pretty astonishing for any type of a festival.
Why not start slowly with just FYC panels, maybe at the TV Academy theater in North Hollywood?
Quite honestly, FYCs got added last. We were not intending to have FYCs. Because we wanted Televerse to actually be separate from the Emmys in many ways. We’re looking for a way to embrace television more broadly. We love that the Emmys recognize the top shows of any given year. But we’ve always said we want to represent more television as it’s coming up, and there are many shows that don’t quite get the recognition yet that we’d love to make sure our members and the public are aware of. So our focus when we were developing the idea of the festival was actually not to make it an FYC or Emmy-focused thing. Originally, our thought was we would actually do a festival between Creative Arts and the telecast, because we’re already downtown. It was going to always be about what’s coming up, what’s next. But we heard loud and clear from the industry, ‘no, you cannot do that to us. We won’t participate. That’s too busy of a time period. There’s already so much going on.’ Sitting down with the TV Academy executive committee and talking with some of our awards partners, we decided to move it back a month, and add in the FYC component and see how that goes.
At the same time, you brought in the ATX folks to help out with programming. Will they return next year?
Beyond this, it’s unclear. We love Emily and Caitlin and we’ve worked with ATX for a number of years. We’ve done a number of panels with them and sponsored a lot of their green rooms and mixers down there. They were a natural fit for us, as we’re getting our feet wet. We don’t have a staff that can just suddenly broaden and do a whole other festival right before the Emmys. It’s been a great relationship this year. Certainly we want to be talking with them about what happens in the future. One of the things they said was such a natural fit was, is they’re programming ATX and if something couldn’t quite happen at ATX, three months later, there’s another festival going on in Los Angeles
What have you learned that maybe hasn’t worked?
I will be frank, we started registration at 9 a.m. and we were not ready for registration. If you talk to my staff, they will marvel at the fact that around 2 p.m. on Thursday, you would have found me alphabetizing lists of badges just to make sure we were getting back on track. We quickly recouped on Thursday night, modified how we’re doing registration, and now it’s probably the smoothest I’ve ever seen a registration happen. We’re learning a lot about how ticketing works with a festival. We started with a per-session ticketing option — which was, every session you went to, you were going to have to pay a low fee. But once you saw the broadening of the programming, and so many more sessions, if you really want people to attend all those panels, what they really want is a badge that lets them into everything. So we had to add all access passes in the middle of things. And we’re learning things with our partners. Certainly learning that four weeks between nominations and an FYC panel is a really hard slog to get through. That’s a lot of what we’ll be looking at for next year,
The J.W. Marriott is also big space. Is this the best space for something like Televerse, is there another way to configure it, or is there a different location? Could you do this at the Academy?
I think the problem with the Academy is we just don’t have enough different rooms that we could use. I will tell you, the J.W. Marriott is just a phenomenal partner to us, and they have been so great to work with throughout this whole experience. They have bent over backwards to make sure that they have accommodated whatever we had in terms of requirements or needs. So, yeah, it’s a larger space. But, it’s not Comic Con, it’s even not ATX, which is spread out over six or seven different venues. We are at least confined in that way. But it’s certainly something we’re going to look at again for next year and figure out what makes the most sense.
Did Thursday/Friday/Saturday work? Or would a weekend Friday/Saturday/Sunday have been better?
If we’re going to do it again next year, I think we might go ahead and do more of a Saturday/Sunday thing — with maybe a very large opening night celebration. We had asked our members, could they do Thursday afternoon? Could they do a Friday afternoon? We heard from them primarily that they could. In actual practice, people are working, so it’s always going to be easier on the weekend. Clearly, once you’re established like Comic-Con, people will make the time. We’re not quite there yet. I do think that it is a little harder for Thursday and Friday, especially if you’re targeting the industry who is actually getting back to work.
Are you looking at next year’s dates yet?
Not yet. It all depends on how we feel after this, and we take a look at our programming. If we are to continue with the FYC idea, clearly it would be better to give our partners a little more time. Does that mean that we try to advance nominations? Does that mean we try to delay this a week, which means we’re delaying voting by a week? Do we take into account when do schools go back in session? There’s a sweet spot that we have to figure out in that regard.
The goal of this was, of course, to be a new revenue stream. But it can’t be cheap to put this on. How are we looking in year one?
We knew this was going to be an investment. The way we put our business plan together, we’re expecting it to be investment for the first couple of years. Part of this was proving that we can actually build the infrastructure, we can put together the programming that will work, we can attract an audience at least. Once we’ve got that, it’s going to be much easier, we feel, next year to sell more sponsorships. We’ll be able to attract more of an audience now that they’ve heard about it, and they know what it is… We’re going to bring in what we expected to in this first year, knowing it was not going to cover costs necessarily. It was not intended to, but we expect that that will improve over the next couple of years.
So not breaking even this year, correct?
How we talked about it with the board is, you have to invest first. No one’s going to be able to just overnight become a sensation. Comic-Con was certainly not what it was when it first started. It was a small, little comics convention with people selling comic books on the floor. We started a little bigger than that.
What is this costing in year one?
It was a significant investment, but one that we felt was fiscally responsible based on where the academy is.
What’s the biggest part of that investment? What’s driving the cost?
It’s the overhead of all of the infrastructure. You’ve got an army of people here who are helping manage the day. You’ve got the actual event space itself. This is absolutely something that we are hoping to build on year after year. What Frank Scherma commissioned was a business plan, a full study, to make sure that we think that this is something we can do. We felt, after doing that study, that there was an appetite for this, that there was an opportunity in LA for this. Cris, when he came in, he loved the idea. He kept hearkening back to the days of when TV Guide was the thing in September. He wanted us to be kind of the new TV Guide in the fall. This should be the thing where people are announcing and introducing new things to the membership as they’re thinking about the new year for Emmy eligibility, but celebrating the year in television as well.
When do you start making some nice profit off of this?
I think that our goal is certainly, we don’t want to just be investing too much into the future. It’s certainly within a year or two.
What has the reaction been from studios and networks? I know the original plan was to do more in terms of activations and pop-ups.
I think that was us possibly running a little bit before we were supposed to be crawling. When we first announced this with our partners, they were very excited about it. They loved the idea of possibly doing the FYCs. We kept having those conversations, and we all thought this was great. And then it became a reality, and it became much harder. Our studio and network partners have supported us through this in a remarkable way. I certainly think there have been challenges along the way as we really moved forward with this, and that will be something we talk a lot about for next year. How do we make sure that all of us can do something like this in a way that works for the industry, that doesn’t overwhelm the industry in any way — and that’s both on the Academy side and with our partners. The other thing that helps us having done it now once, is we can go out to those partners now to start planning better. And they will actually acknowledge the reality of it, which I think will help us more from the programming side of where we want to be heading — which is debuts and premieres.
It was the great unknown.
Are people going to come? What’s it really going to look like? Can they pull this off? We’re hoping that we believe that we have shown we can do it. So we’re hoping now that we can have those conversations with our partners, and they can go, ‘Yeah, we agree. Let’s figure out now how to make this work for all of us.’
Do you see more of an outreach next year to consumers?
Most of our marketing and messaging was just email and other communications to members, with some to the industry and very little to the public. And yet, we still got some large remnants of the public to come in. Next year, I think we’ll be focused a lot more on the public.
The cost for panels was $10,000 for an hour. Do we see that changing in year two?
I think that’s one of the things we’re going to have to really look at. We’re going to have to look at our own analytics from a budget perspective and what we’re spending. We’re going to have to talk to our partners to see what the value is they felt they got, versus what they spent. I will admit, yeah, they’re paying us $10,000 but then they also have travel and other costs to get their cast out here. So there is an expense that they are incurring.
I know this year they were also spending some money for their own marketing, to make sure that they were packing the rooms.
One of the big challenges that we didn’t think about this year is, it is hard for us to actually promote FYCs for our partners — because we don’t want to be seen as partial to anyone. We couldn’t promote any one specific FYC. How do we coordinate with our partners to ensure that each FYC is getting that promotion when we can’t be the ones driving it? That was a big thing that we had to learn to work with our partners on specifically.
What are the key notes that you’re hearing from partners and attendees?
That the sessions we’ve done have been really meaningful, that we got really great people on these panels. And I think our partners actually were really pleased, generally across the board, at the turnout in terms of the membership. One of the things that we heard very early on that were concerns about is we weren’t allowing plus ones. And we got a good cross section of members that aren’t necessarily the same members they have been seeing repeatedly at some of their round one FYCs. So I think that was a really great success story, too.
Was the plus one question an issue?
There were no plus ones allowed this time. Everybody had to register. So if you had a guest you wanted to bring, they could come. They had to register. And the way we did the FYCs is we reserved the majority of it was for voting members. There was a small selection that could be purchased.
Some of the most anticipated panels were held opposite each other, was that a problem?
Fortunately, we have a large membership. So if the members are interested in coming, the engaging panels, you’re going to fill them no matter what. We had originally thought we would do by genre on the days. The problem with that was we didn’t actually have enough time, and we were going to have to double up random programs. So, on Saturday, you were going to end up with two comedy programs together, not necessarily from even the same studio, because they were going to have a slot that had to combine them together. Maybe it would have been would have been better to say, we’re going to do all the comedies on one day. We’re going to do all the dramas on one day, because then people could plan out their day in a different way. It’s hard to know. We’ll have to figure that out.
Talk about adding Hall of Fame to the Televerse lineup.
I’ll be honest, yes, we see how AMPAS does the Governors’ Award, which kind of kicks off their season, and they get a lot of talent to come out. That’s the kind of thing we’d love to see for the Hall of Fame as well.
Could you eventually televise the Hall of Fame?
We’d love to get back on television with the Hall of Fame at some point. I think we have to figure out how to do it.
So, was this worth the cost? If it’s going to take a few years to break even, will the Academy have the patience in this economy to wait that long?
I can’t answer that question yet, because clearly this is not my decision. We’re going to have a many a conversation at the board level about, how did this go? How did the board feel about it. Did it achieve the aims of the board? Did they feel it was success? What would success look like for them in the future? If I was giving you my gut based of what I’ve heard, they all seem very pleased with it. I think that they certainly would be interested in continuing, at least to try again and see what more we can do with it in years two or three. Beyond that, it’s really hard for me to say.
