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Imagine's genre-bending shows are inherently risky, while most prime-time hours are filled with knock-offs of last season's big hits. Seinfeld was off the air less than a year before writer alum Peter Mehlman was back with It's like, you know..., which differs only in that it explores West Coast rather than East Coast inanities (car chases, cell phones and celebrities instead of parking places, subways and Chinese restaurants). "You flip the channels, and everything looks the same," says Thomas Schlamme, who went from directing the critically acclaimed Larry Sanders Show to executive-producing Sports Night. "You get the setup on one channel and the punch line on another." Viewers aren't laughing. Of the 36 prime-time shows that debuted last fall, at least 21 won't be around next September.
Network chiefs, having watched their prime-time audience share erode from 91% for the big-three networks 20 years ago to 60% shared by six of them today, seem too paralyzed to make real changes. "Networks are locked in a box like the rest of corporate America," says Norman Lear, who created All in the Family. "In TV terms that translates into 'Gimme an instant hit' at the expense of every other value, like creativity." Instead of looking beyond Burbank for people with fresh ideas, the networks return to the same talent pool over and over. As Imagine's Grazer puts it, "Everyone is sucking up the same creative oxygen." And too often, when something different comes their way, they turn it down. Case in point: CBS, NBC and Fox passed on The Sopranos before it found a home on HBO, becoming the season's big hit.
What the Imagine partners have going for them, besides their willingness to experiment, is relationships with some of the most creative talents in the business. Krantz, 39, has a killer Rolodex of contacts from his days at CAA and a history of packaging some of TV's biggest deals (teaming Michael Crichton and ER with NBC, for instance). He persuaded Lynch to return to TV and convinced screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The American President) to try the medium for the first time. The result: Sports Night. Krantz and Grazer, 47, so liked the work of screenwriter J.J. Abrams (Regarding Henry) that they bought Abrams' script for Felicity as a TV series after just one read-through. Steve Martin, who worked with Grazer on the 1989 film Parenthood, is developing a half-hour sitcom called Acting Class. And M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart is playing around with ideas for a new series for Imagine.
Imagine (which is in partnership with Disney's Touchstone Television) is also nurturing unknown talent. After seeing The Script Doctor, a short film made for just $150 by the Fields brothers, a Cleveland, Ohio, threesome who worked in their father's wedding-video business, the company hired them to develop Student Affairs. And New York independent filmmaker Noah Baumbach, 29, got a telephone call from Imagine inviting him to pitch TV ideas similar to his chatty, cerebral film comedies (one, Kicking and Screaming, was about a group of guys who graduate from college but won't leave). Baumbach came up with Thirty, based in part on his own life and the lives of his friends.