Jana Winograde, former president of Showtime, and Susan Rovner, ex-president of Warner Bros. TV, are partnering with former ABC chairman Lloyd Braun to launch a new microseries platform called aTwist. The platform is set to debut on September 3 and aims to professionalize the rapidly growing but largely unregulated microseries industry.
Winograde and Rovner, who previously held top positions in legacy television, stated that their decision to move into microseries was a response to the shrinking opportunities and "managing decline" within traditional Hollywood structures. "We realized that any employment we would have, in the way that we always thought of ourselves as executives in these big companies, we would be managing decline," Winograde told Page Six.
The trio sees microseries, which have gained significant traction in China and are emerging in the U.S., as the next evolution of television. "The second we saw them, we knew that was the thing we wanted to do," Rovner added.
aTwist intends to bring a more structured, Hollywood-style production approach to the microseries space. This move is seen by industry insiders as a significant step towards legitimizing the burgeoning market. "We bring a lot of trust," Rovner said. "It's a lot of the wild, wild west right now."
The platform will feature a diverse range of content, including scripted dramas and comedies, such as "My Book Boyfriend Came To Life" and Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Justin Mikita's musical comedy "Theater Kids Vs. Zombies." aTwist is also venturing into unscripted series, a genre less common in the microseries market, with Josh Silberman overseeing this division.
Winograde and Rovner have established an in-house team of salaried writers and aim to provide more opportunities for emerging talent who may find it harder to break into the industry through traditional pathways. "It's so much harder to break into the business in a traditional way," Rovner noted. "The vast majority of the people that we are hiring and working with are more of the up and comers, and more of people who are having a harder time breaking in."
While acknowledging the continued role of traditional television and feature films for large-scale storytelling, the founders believe microseries fill a crucial need for accessible, engaging content. "There's always going to be a role for traditional television and streaming and theatrical features because they're telling big epic stories that cost a lot of money," Winograde stated. "But with vertical integration and consolidation, there are just less opportunities to create great stories. But the need for those stories still exists."