John Landgraf

We need you to go bigger and we need you to open the door wide open because we think you can.

And coming from a place from FX's perspective and John Landgraf's perspective in particular of belief in the show and this cast and the possibility of what it could be.

Look, we were thinking about a very specific audience when we wrote especially early episodes of season one.

It's a tall task to try to write something for this generation, a format that hasn't really been served to them by them just yet, especially at that point.

This is one of those ones where it's like FX marketing and FX PR are just the best of the best.

They are so, so wonderful.

And I think really, you know, as helmed by John Landgraf, who is just one of the great geniuses of television, I think they really were like, how do we... to Ben's point about putting out a welcome mat, show people the show as it already has been and as it exists.

And I think they really led this blitz of sort of putting it on taxi cabs and billboards and making sure, frankly, we got the cast in front of people just because they are the magic of the show.

How are those two going to be integrated? Who gets layered? Will Casey Bloys accept a layered role under his former direct competitor, Cindy Holland? Not likely.

So what are they going to do? Are they going to create a John Landgraf like reporting structure where Casey can still report into David Ellison and oversee his own side of the kingdom? HBO and that's it.

And maybe HBO has a direct to streaming tab or something like that on whatever the new super streamer is called.

Similar to FX on Hulu.

I've talked about this hundreds of episodes ago.

When John Landgraf, the head of FX, was talking about, was always mentioning every single year at the upfronts, hey, we've got 600 shows, 600 brand new TV shows are going to premiere this year.

And then the next year, like... 700 brand new shows are premiering this year that's brand new not just new seasons of shows brand new shows and then eight and then we got to 900 brand new shows and then he's like this is peak tv and it's probably never going to get bigger than this and uh the pandemic hit and then we just saw a massive decline of tv shows and even still there's a lot of shows This year's ballot drew 110 drama series, down 126 from 2025.

71 comedies, down from 69.

It's insane.

Imagine like a ruthless corporate boardroom where the visionary CEO suddenly drops dead.

Yeah.

And the only legal heir to this multi-billion dollar empire is literally a toddler, so they put the board of directors in charge as caretakers.

They are tackling this ambitious saga through a much more inclusive lens.

Right.

FX Network's CEO, John Landgraf, is quoted directly in the text.

He says the goal is to tell the collision of two cultures from both perspectives, told through many Japanese points of view rather than just the singular Western white male perspective.

Yeah.

There was a TV executive named John Landgraf who, uh, coined the term peak TV, being like, "We, we can't possibly make more TV at this point." Um, that was about 10 years ago now.

[laughs]

Wow.

What we do in the shadows, Atlanta, like they, Dave, they just do this so well.

So I think I, I think that John Landgraf is such a genius and has a soft spot for the old comedy, like this sort of proper sitcom.

So we'll see, we're keeping our fingers crossed.

But for now, I think we're just sort of like, give us the number of episodes and we'll fill them to the best of our ability.