The fifth season goes into second gear on television; Covers of Ramin Bahrani’s ‘Grapes Of Wrath’ and Amy Adams’ ‘Love Of My Life’ lead the way to the next level

EXCLUSIVE: Fifth Season is gearing up for its first full year with new owners and a new name.

Formerly known as Endeavor Content, the company has new owners in Korea’s CJ ENM following a $785 million deal, and on the TV side, it has transitioned from a company that collected a few popular orders from streamers to one that updates and new areas start getting.

Series like Apple’s dismissalHBO Max Tokyo Vice, peacock wolves like me and even Nicole Kidman with Hulu Nine total strangersoriginally conceived as a limited series, returns for a second season.

Fifth Season is now also exploring new fronts, including a growing international business with the opportunity for global co-productions and entering new genres such as romance novels starring the likes of Amy Adams and finding their own take on a show like Is dark material.

All this is happening amid a changing media landscape, with a wave of layoffs and restructuring and a looming writer’s strike.

Joe Hipps, President, TV Development and Production, comments on developments as he outlines what the season five television business will be like for years to come.

Two new projects the company is looking forward to are adaptations of Grapes of wrath and The love of my life.

Ramin Bahrani, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind it The White Tigerwhich was behind Samuel L. Jackson’s Apple miniseries The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, is attached to write and direct a series adaptation Grapes of wrath.

Published in 1939, John Steinbeck’s novel is set during the Great Depression and follows a poor family of farmers who are driven from their Oklahoma home and moved to California. Instead, it became the classic film starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford.

Hipps says the series is in its historical roots, but Bahrani has some “interesting ideas” to bring it contemporary with music.

Fifth Season is developing the project with Brad Weston’s MakeReady, one of the production banners, with which it has a production and financing deal.

It is also the latest Steinbeck project for the company, which is a limited series adaptation of east of Eden on Netflix by Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of Elia Kazan who directed the 1955 film version, and starring Florence Pugh. Hipps says they are looking to start production in early 2024.

Similarly, Adams is heavily involved in an adaptation of Rosie Walsh’s New York Times bestseller The love of my life. The book tells the story of marine biologist Emma, ​​whose obituary husband Leo investigates everything about his wife’s life, which is a lie, as she suffers from a serious illness.

Adams recently inked a first-look deal with Fifth Season on the Bond Group Entertainment banner and is in the process of developing the mystery thriller that may feature a protagonist for the sharp objects Star.

“This is a thriller with a very romantic element. It’s an old-fashioned romance, maybe it’s gone, but this one has a really cool premise,” he adds.

FIFTH SEASON LOCATION

Korean CJ ENM finalized its deal for 80% of the company earlier this year, and the company switched from Endeavor Content to Fifth Season in September. While there was a lot of talk about Endeavor Content’s connections to WME owner Endeavor, it was mostly industry tidbits and not a real misunderstanding of what the studio was.

There hasn’t been a real shift in focus since the change in ownership, but the move underscores the company’s drive: independence in a world where most studios act largely as a pipeline to their own streaming services or networks.

Hipps spent 10 years at MRC and previously managed the production company of Dawn Parouse at the then 20th Century Fox Television and at escape from prison Producer Adelstein-Parouse Productions.

“I’ve been in the studio game my whole career and I really think there’s value in that. Everyone would love to own everything, we would love it, streamers would love it, but that assumes you can pick anything and get everything first,” he says. “But we tend to house these things in-house. As production ramps up, everyone is 10 times as busy, so I think it’s best to take your time… [a project] is ready and baked to go to market because in six months everything can change. If it’s good, people will buy it whether they want it or not.”

He admits that going directly to a buyer and studio can be an advantage for writers and producers because they will buy sooner, but the downside is that you often have to stand in line.

“In the past, people and agents went into business for themselves when they didn’t know what to do with something. Actually, I think the argument is now the opposite. When you have that thing that you know how to sell, it’s time to go to a place like ours where you can really control your own destiny,” he adds.

In addition to Thanks, Tokyo Vice and Wolf lives meJason Momoas stars in the television show written through season 5 To seewhich recently aired its final season with Apple, and Momoa’s next Apple series war chief, by Amy Schumer life & bedwhich has been renewed for a second season on Hulu, Octavia Spencer To be honest and Natalie Portman’s upcoming Apple series lady in the lake.

It has about 20 series greenlit or in production, has sold about 30 projects to streamers and networks for development, and about 150 more projects in development within the studio.

NINE STRANGE PERFECTS

Another show that has been revamped is Nine total strangerswhose return was announced when Hulu was accepted into the drama series category at the Emmys instead of the limited series category.

Deadline reckons Nicole Kidman will return for the second season of the wellness series based on the book by Liane Moriarty, with some of the other cast members including Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Luke Evans, Bobby Cannavale, Regina Hall, Samara Weaving also returning with new cast ala The White Lotus. A writers room is currently working on the second season.

According to Hipps, the company is familiar with contemporary thrillers, especially talent and crime projects. It now wants to branch out and look at more genre projects, with the IP coming first, marking a co-production between HBO and BBC Is dark material as an example.

“Bigger genre pieces, four-quadrant series, that’s one area. However, a lot of our stuff tends to be star-driven, with great, juicy roles [we’re now looking at projects] where the IP might go first, and we’ve talked to some filmmakers and showrunners who work in that space,” he adds.

Most of the fifth season series are also broadcast or in development by streamers, especially Apple. Hipps says he has projects in development with premium cable networks like Showtime and Starz and wants to try to break into the basic cable space.

He considered whether the fifth season could move to television. In his opinion, one of the challenges is that the company does not work in a cycle, but with whom he has held discussions among others osark co-creator Bill Dubuque, who signed an overall deal with the company in October.

“There is definitely material and there have been a few times with some broadcasters where they have bid on something that we have shown them. It’s not something we introduced, but we’ve had conversations, I’ve talked to Bill Dubuque about where his character is procedurally,” he says.

In addition to Dubuque and Adams, Season 5 has a slew of total and first-look offerings, including Liza Chasin, Lynette Howell Taylor, Is dark material producer Bad Wolf USA and even volatile music producer Rick Rubin.

Hipps says that a few years ago, every time they did an author list, everyone had an agreement. “The beauty of what we’re seeing now is that there are certainly a lot of people coming off long-term contracts and more available.”

There are likely to be further shifts in the author landscape over the next year as the threat of a strike looms.

Prepare for a strike like all major studios, fifth season plans a number of different scenarios. “You can’t just collect as much material as you can, you can plan as much as you can, but at some point there will be things that we can’t control,” he says.

“Writers should get what they want,” he adds. “With everything that’s going on, the downsizing in different places, the redundancies, it’s quite scary and I think people in the middle are really suffering.”

This year has seen many reorganizations and layoffs, affecting most companies, be it Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and the rest of the streamers are.

“You see a lot of places doing deals. There’s a change of guard… when I turn something off, when something happens on Amazon or Showtime, all of a sudden [there’s change], but this too is constantly changing. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that this place might not be actively buying, but they might come back,” he says.

Hipps has recently his boss Chris Rice’s statement that such economic pressure can lead to co-production opportunities and new ways of funding programs.

The company has a strong international business. It has investments in a number of non-US manufacturing companies, such as The night manager Producer The Ink Factory, Motive Pictures which makes Showtime and BBC gothic thrillers The woman in the wall with Ruth Wilson, The Story Collective, Nordic Drama Queens, Dreamchasers and Made Up Stories from Australia and Blink 49 from Canada.

For example, this is how Amazon’s first Australian original series is created The Lost Flowers by Alice Hart with Sigourney Weaver and a statement made in the UK by hiring BBC drama chef Ben Irving to produce series such as His dark material, Doctor Who and happy valley

Domestically, too, the workforce is growing through a series of new hires and promotions.

“The big picture as we get ready for Endeavor Content 2.0 or now Season 5 1.0 where everyone wants to scale, we’re going to continue to make premium stuff, which really just means making good stuff that people want to see,” he adds.