Reality TV's jackpot queen
Cecile Frot-Coutaz is a force behind American Idol and America's Got Talent. Can her brand of schlock save network TV?
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| Frot-Coutaz with host Drew Carey on the set of Fremantle's The Price Is Right |
(Fortune magazine) -- Have the rumors of network television's demise been greatly exaggerated? It was hard not to wonder whether years of obituaries had been premature as NBC racked up prodigious ratings last month for its coverage of the Beijing Olympics. According to Nielsen, 28 million Americans tuned in nightly to watch Michael Phelps crawl, breaststroke, butterfly, and backstroke his way to eight gold medals. They kept watching even as stars from other nations, such as Jamaica's felicitously named Usain Bolt, sprinted to glory.
The other recent network surprise? The success of NBC's America's Got Talent. This competition-cum-freak-show is hosted by Jerry Springer, daytime's foremost sleazemeister, and pits sword-swallowing carnival performers against cross-dressing Britney Spears impersonators. Its 12.6 million viewers made it the summer's top-ranked regularly scheduled show.
America's Got Talent, the Olympics, and the ratings king of the new millennium - American Idol - are all bona fide recent hits. But if you strip out the Olympics, which after all come along only every two years, what do the other two have in common? Well, Cecile Frot-Coutaz, for starters. She's the CEO of FremantleMedia North America, which co-produces both shows. Frot-Coutaz (pronounced FROT-coo-TAHZ) was instrumental in bringing American Idol to our shores and selling it to Fox. The 42-year-old Los Angeles-based French expatriate has an instinct for high-performance reality television. And whether you're addicted to American Idol and America's Got Talent or think they represent the final, irrevocable collapse of Western civilization, she's one of the people whose success will determine whether network TV really can resuscitate itself, or if this summer was its swan song and the networks are destined to continue on their path of fragmentation and decline.
Think of Frot-Coutaz, an MBA and former corporate strategist at Pearson, as the suit (Chanel, please) who controls the purse strings on Idol and Got Talent, as her company refers to them. Simon Fuller, the British impresario behind the Spice Girls, may have created American Idol (and his 19 Entertainment company still co-produces it). Ken Warwick - and until recently, So You Think You Can Dance judge Nigel Lythgoe - runs the show on a daily basis. But it is Frot-Coutaz who played a key role in selling the show to Fox, and it is she who implemented the groundbreaking and lucrative product-placement deals with Coke (KO, Fortune 500) and Ford (F, Fortune 500).
Not least among her skills: She has mediated feuds involving Idol's volatile personalities, among them Simon Cowell, the show's famously acerbic judge. Cowell practically purrs when he is asked about Frot-Coutaz. "She has kept everyone together," he says. "Without her being there, I dread to think of what would have happened." Now Cowell and Frot-Coutaz are producing America's Got Talent together.
The last few years have been good for the North American division of FremantleMedia, a British reality-television producer responsible for the Idol and Got Talent franchises in the U.S. and around the globe. Fremantle doesn't break out its financial results. Still, you can get a sense of how Frot-Coutaz is doing by examining the public filings of the Bertelsmann subsidiary that is Fremantle's parent. The subsidiary's U.S. revenues - the bulk of which are generated by her group - were $310 million in 2007, up from $280 million the year before and $177 million in 2005.
Even so, this is no time to relax. American Idol ended on a high note with 32 million people tuning into the May 21 finale, an increase of 3% from the previous year's denouement. But the first hairline cracks have appeared in the juggernaut. Regular viewership has slipped nearly 11% in the past two seasons, according to Nielsen. And though America's Got Talent caught on after it amped up the bizarreness of some of its acts while playing up the contestants' human interest stories, its staying power is still unclear. (Got Talent makes Idol look like Masterpiece Theater, though it also borrows a few elements from the singing contest, including having an eclectic panel of judges: former Baywatch hunk and camp hero David Hasselhoff, ex-reality star Sharon Osbourne, and Piers Morgan, a former British tabloid editor apparently imported to inject a dose of Cowellian bile.)
Now Frot-Coutaz is pinning her hopes on Hole in the Wall, her company's version of a Japanese "Human Tetris" in which contestants must squeeze themselves through various openings in a moving wall or get knocked into a swimming pool. It debuts on Fox on Sept. 11. Is Hole in the Wall the next Idol? It seems like a long shot - to use a more polite phrase than, say, a caustic TV judge might choose - but then again it wouldn't be the first unexpected reality hit.
"Look, hopefully, we will have many more successful shows," says Frot-Coutaz. "Whether they will hit people the way Idol does, I don't know. If your objective was to come up with something as big as that, you'd be setting yourself up for failure. You'd wake up every morning and be really depressed."
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On the morning after the American Idol finale in May, Frot-Coutaz sat on the couch in her Burbank, Calif., office, discussing the cultural phenomenon's slipping numbers. The elegant executive is known for her infectious giggle, but she was clearly fretting. "We need to freshen it," she said. "Our auditions have looked the same for four seasons now. I just think we need to make some changes so viewers feel the show is evolving." Sure enough, in late August, Idol announced it was adding a fourth judge, a Grammy-nominated songwriter named Kara DioGuardi. "Pop Idol [the original British version of the show] always had four judges," Frot-Coutaz tells Fortune after the announcement. "We just could never find the fourth one. We are going to introduce a number of changes, and that's the first one."
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