Paramount+ catapulted into the world on March 4, but its arrival didn’t exactly inspire mass fanfare. Born out of the ashes of CBS All Access, Paramount+ entered an overcrowded field of subscription streaming platforms whose barrage of bingeable content was already inducing decision fatigue in viewers. Media watchers shrugged, skeptical that Paramount+ could keep pace—creatively or financially—with deep-pocketed competitors like Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, and Disney+.
Paramount+ aims to be a souped-up streaming machine delivering the bounty of ViacomCBS and its many brands, which include Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, and CBS. In its first several months, it stirred up some interest with reality TV originals (like an emotionally intense reunion of MTV’s first cast of The Real World and a new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars), live sports (the UEFA Champions League), and kids programming (including a SpongeBob movie and an iCarly reboot).
But where were the bold adult scripted series? Netflix built its brand with word-of-mouth shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. Hulu won awards with The Handmaid’s Tale; Disney+ roared out of the gate with The Mandalorian; and Apple TV+ brandished The Morning Show and Dickinson as its calling cards. Meanwhile, Paramount+ launched without any marquee adult scripted premieres. It looked like the streamer had arrived at a gun fight with an empty holster. “I view Paramount+ as a pretty weak offering,” Jeff Wlodarczak, principal analyst at Pivotal Research Group, told me last month. “It is not differentiated enough.”
Last week, ViacomCBS reorganized the company’s executive ranks to focus the company’s top resources on Paramount+. David Nevins, the longtime CEO of Showtime and chief creative officer of CBS, was charged with overseeing scripted originals for Paramount+. His pedigree includes developing Showtime series like Homeland and The Affair, and he also had a hand in well-reviewed CBS All Access originals like the Star Trek series Picard and The Good Fight.
But Nevins knows that there’s a lot of pressure on to create “shows that are going to stand out from the pack.… The fundamental goal is to drive subscriptions,” he says, “either by keeping people who’ve already subscribed glued to the service, or causing them to want to sign up through buzz and media attention.”
Just as the unscripted and kids side of Paramount+ is leaning heavily into franchises and reboots, Nevins says the scripted team “is definitely focusing on a significant proportion of known quantities.” Translation: They are ransacking ViacomCBS’s closet for any vintage material worth resuscitating or reimagining.
The Offer, a limited series about the making of The Godfather starring Miles Teller and Juno Temple, is going into production in the next few weeks, and a series based on Fatal Attraction is in active development. The Star Trek television universe will keep expanding with upcoming series like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and a Frasier revival is under discussion. Nevins gets especially excited talking about a musical spinoff of the movie Grease, centered on outcast girl gang the Pink Ladies. “I think it has really real modern resonance and just a really fun poppy script,” he says. “Grease is the kind of thing that transcends generations...and how great would it be to have a new show that feels like it deals with some of the politics of being a teen today, but through the filter of the ’50s?”
One of the big questions surrounding Paramount+ was whether it would absorb BET and Showtime’s own subscription streaming arms (BET+ and Showtime), the way that Hulu scooped up its sibling prestige cable network FX, and HBO Max incorporated HBO Go. In this make-or-break moment for legacy media companies, wouldn’t it be good to throw everything they have into the pot?
Nevins’s short answer? No. The company will make it easier to bundle Paramount+ and Showtime in the next couple of months, however. He compares the situation to Disney, which keeps Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ as standalone services, but offers them together at a discount for those who want it all. “We think there’s a benefit in keeping them separate,” Nevins says.
That means Nevins sometimes has to sort out which productions belong on Showtime vs. Paramount+. Halo, an epic action series based on the Xbox video game franchise, was originally developed at Showtime, but will premiere on Paramount+ next year. The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, went the opposite way. “As we were reading all the scripts, we felt like Halo was a big, broad, four-quadrant show, in the parlance of Hollywood—it’s young and old and male and female. It felt like it had a lot of potential and we said, That’s a show that can help take Paramount+ to the next level,” Nevins recalls. “And Man Who Fell to Earth we felt was more sophisticated, more adult in its themes and in its appeal, so we felt like that was more Showtime.”
Paramount+ scripted originals won’t entirely rely on familiar I.P. though. Kiefer Sutherland is set to star in a thriller series (as yet untitled) that Nevins compares to The Usual Suspects, Three Days of the Condor, and The Bourne Identity—“like, a regular guy gets caught up in a high-stakes spy story and nothing is what it seems. It feels very cinematic.” That’s something he wants to see more of in Paramount+ originals. “We want it to feel big and movie-like, thrilling, and fun,” he says. Kenya Barris, who recently left his massive Netflix deal to head BET Studios, is developing some original programming for Paramount+, including a series with Rashida Jones, who costarred with him in the Netflix series #blackAF.
Nevins is also hoping that two existing dramas created by Michelle and Robert King will continue to pick up bigger audiences on Paramount+. The inventive and politically provocative Good Fight has been a critics’ darling since it premiered on CBS All Access in 2017. Despite an enviable cast that includes Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald, it never quite broke through to a broader audience—probably because that broader audience wasn’t watching CBS All Access. (When I asked the creators a few years ago who CBS All Access’s audience was, Robert King quipped, “Trekkies!”)
The Kings also created Evil, a wittily eerie show about a ragtag group investigating unexplained mysteries that initially aired on CBS’s prime-time lineup. Its second season recently premiered exclusively on Paramount+, and V.F.’s Richard Lawson called it “the best show you might not be watching.” Other critics declared it “worth signing up for” a Paramount+ subscription, and “the one TV show that makes Paramount+ worth the price.”
That’s exactly the kind of reaction Nevins is hoping for. He agrees that CBS All Access was “a narrow universe” that might have limited the audience for a show like The Good Fight. But Paramount+, he says, is undergoing “a year of unprecedented growth that wasn’t really possible in the All Access days. I think as this current season [of The Good Fight] rolls out, we’re seeing a lot of viewership to old episodes, because people are coming fresh to the service, and discovering the show.”
It’s clearly much easier to leverage nostalgia than to create something new in the marketplace these days. ViacomCBS streaming boss Tom Ryan knows a thing or two about retrovision; he cocreated Pluto TV, a free streamer laden with classic shows that is now part of ViacomCBS. “We find on Pluto that this notion of comfort food TV is really appealing to customers,” Ryan tells me. “People want things that are familiar, and they enjoy them when they’re rejuvenated for a new era.”
Rebooting old favorites, whether iCarly or Frasier, does not only mean connecting with those who watched the shows in their youth; Ryan says it also brings in new viewers watching for the first time. “The combination strategy of doing a reboot, plus having the full catalog available for bingeing, is a one-two punch that we’re finding really effective.”
With most of the big streamers throwing dizzying amounts of money into content creation, one glaring question is whether Paramount+ has enough of a budget to compete. “I’m confident that we do, that we’re generating enough cash, and we have capital to spend,” Nevins says. And instead of licensing ViacomCBS’s most lucrative properties to other platforms, as it has in the past—the MTV Studios–produced comedy series Emily in Paris became a hit for Netflix, for instance, and the movie sequel Coming 2 America aired on Amazon—Nevins says that “the energy is now behind building our internal platforms, be it CBS or Showtime or Paramount+.”
I mention to Nevins that a media consultant recently described Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and the merged HBO Max/Discovery+ to me as the “big four” behemoths of streaming, with Paramount+ and NBCUniversal’s Peacock on the outside looking in. Nevins protests gracefully that this is not a zero-sum game or a locked clubhouse. He sees it as a state of flux, a wave to be ridden.
“Every household is making a decision pretty much every month about what to subscribe to, and that is very fluid,” he says. “There’s no question Netflix is a market leader. But some households are going to have two services, some are going to have five. And generally, two through five are going to be a rotating set, depending on who has what I want [to watch] this month. So there’s going to be room for a lot of people to play.”
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