STARZ presented “The White Queen” to the Television Critics Association today, but STARZ CEO Chris Albrecht opened the session with some big news. He’s already ordered a second season of the Michael Bay produced pirate series “Black Sails,” before it’s even aired.
“We have been viewing a terrific first season, just had a really exciting fan screening at Comic-Con of the first episode and we thought that Michael Bay, Jon Steinberg and their teams deserved the opportunity to have all the time,” explained Albrecht “Making this decision now gives them the opportunity to prepare in the same way for the second season as they did for the first and gives us the opportunity to keep the show on 12 month cycles.”
Albrecht mentioned the Comic-Con screening, but later clarified that he had already made the decision on a second season by then. “We love this show so it was definitely the strength of what we saw, our realization that time is a real resource when it comes to making these shows. I think the Comic-Con reaction certainly reinforced what we’ve been feeling ourselves. We just made the decision. We already had the writer’s room started several weeks ago.”
A second season of “Da Vinci’s Demons” is coming next year, as well as series “Outlander,” “Fortitude” and “Power.” “Spartacus” creator Steven DeKnight is still developing “Incursion” with STARZ.
“The status of Steven’s show is that we’re finishing all the episodes,” noted Albrecht. “We have put together a writer’s room. There’s been a lot of preproduction work that has been done. In doing that work, I think we’ve realized just how challenging from a production point of view this is. It really is a theatrical film. The one liner of “Band of Brothers” meets Halo is really apt and comes with all of the necessary command of resources that would need to be applied against it. It’s very much alive. It is on a slow pause just because we can’t go forward with a pilot that would be not affordable. To jump right into the series, we need to do a lot more work in the preproduction phase. Steven DeKnight remains under contract with STARZ. We see him and work with him on any ideas he has and look forward to a long successful partnership with him.”
“Magic City” is finishing its second season and Albrecht would not commit to a third season just yet, although he hinted that a renewal depends on some spoilers for the end of this year. “There are lots of surprises left in the last three episodes of ‘Magic City.’ All will be revealed. We’re fans of the show. As I’ve said before, our pilot process is one or two seasons of a show to really get behind something if we like the work. We’re not evaluating all the options with ‘Magic City’ but we have a couple little surprises in our pocket, in store. You’ll have the answer to your question soon.”
It was pointed out to Albrecht that STARZ has specialized in period piece costume dramas. Does he have any plans for contemporary shows? Many of the upcoming dramas are in fact set in modern day.
“‘Power’ is set in New York right now. ‘Fortitude’ is a modern piece set in a fictional Arctic Circle town based on a real place, so those are two current shows, contemporary shows. We have a lot of contemporary shows in development. We tend to be choosing from amongst the show runners who bring us their ideas. We will be considering that as most costume shops have run out of swords and sandals.”
Lastly, Albrecht was surprised to field a number of questions about “Boss.” First, he assessed the decision not to renew the show after its second season. “There were several things about ‘Boss’ that I wish we could have done over again, including not realizing that the timing of the shooting of the second season was going to make Farhad Safinia take a step back from production. If there’s one thing I have to keep learning over and over again, it’s that in television series, the writer/producer, the showrunner is the God and that person is the keeper of the vision and the executor of that vision. I didn’t really feel like we had a way to take the show after season two and propel it forward, nor did I see a groundswell. Certainly there were fans of the show, but by the pickup of season three you want to feel there’s a reason if I’m going to be doing 3, I’m going to be doing 4 or 5. I didn’t see that in ‘Boss.’ It does inform how I think about things going forward.”
Unfortunately for those remaining fans, Albrecht kiboshed any possibility of a standalone “Boss” finale. “No, that’s not going to happen,” he said. “We tried to make that happen, but Farhad didn’t see it in his head. If he wasn’t going to be able to come up with a way to do that, there was certainly no way to proceed without him.”
