Frot-Coutaz (pg. 2)

Frot-Coutaz acknowledges the all-too-familiar plight of her business. "Television is, broadly speaking, in decline," she says. "There's fragmentation. People are programming more and more for niche audiences. So these big brands are more and more rare. They are also much harder to create. You know, it's harder to launch something today that's going to have the kind of scale of an American Idol than it was seven years ago. So their value in some ways is getting bigger."

As she put it in May, "the more realistic objective is to create shows like America's Got Talent. It doesn't do 30 million viewers, but this season it should do really, really well." Indeed, Frot-Coutaz's soothsaying was borne out as the show surged to 12.6 million viewers. Today Frot-Coutaz has a sober businessperson's explanation for her predictive acumen: The show has taken time to catch on in other markets, so she assumed the same would be true in the U.S.

Frot-Coutaz is not someone you'd imagine as the schlock savior of network TV. Her father, a biochemist specializing in cancer research, wouldn't allow her to watch most TV programs when she was a child in Lyon, France. (He did, however, make an exception for that lowbrow English classic, The Benny Hill Show.) Cecile usually didn't know what to say when her friends at school talked about what they'd seen the previous night. As a result of her dad's edict, pop TV held the allure of the forbidden for her.

She earned her MBA at Paris's prestigious Insead in 1994 and turned down offers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Instead, she took a job as a corporate strategist at Pearson's television division in London. Her boss at the time, Greg Dykes, who later became head of the BBC, instilled her with fearlessness. "He always used to say to me, 'You know what? One day, we're all going to get fired. It just happens.'" she recalls with a laugh. "'So you might as well take risks. At least then you'll know why you're fired.'"

Frot-Coutaz took risks and rose quickly. She oversaw Pearson's acquisition of the original incarnation of Fremantle, which brought the company top game shows like The Price Is Right and Password. The rights to Baywatch also came with the purchase.

By 2000, Pearson Television was a unit of Bertelsmann and was renamed FremantleMedia. Its focus began to shift from syndicating old shows to producing new ones like Pop Idol, the progenitor of the Idol franchise that would eventually migrate to 40 different television markets around the world. In 2002, Fremantle assigned Frot-Coutaz, whom the company had dispatched to the U.S. two years before, to sell an American version of the show.

The French executive helped pitch Idol to reluctant Fox executives after the other three networks turned up their noses. She became the show's master corporate dealmaker and handholder. She's the person who kept Paula Abdul from jumping ship because she was unnerved by Cowell's rhetorical assaults on contestants whose singing fell short of his expectations. "Cecile would fly in, take Paula aside, and say, 'Oh, those terrible English!'" laughs Lythgoe.

Frot-Coutaz also stepped up in 2004, when Cowell signed a deal with Fremantle to create an Idol-like contest called The X Factor, and Fuller's company sued both Cowell's production outfit and Fremantle, arguing that the shows were too similar. Frot-Coutaz negotiated a truce, and the show now airs in Britain and other countries. "I think certainly, at the time, she was the one person that both myself and Simon could talk to and get an honest answer," says Cowell. "She handled that role very well."

Once American Idol became a hit, Frot-Coutaz faced new pressures. She says Fox pushed to run Idol twice a year (a Fox spokesperson denies this), as CBS does with Survivor. But she feared this would shorten Idol's lifespan. Ultimately, Frot-Coutaz got her way. Today she looks prescient. Idol drew an average of 27 million viewers per show this year. A few years ago Survivor boasted such ratings. But last spring Survivor: Micronesia got 12.7 million viewers.

Idol's success opened many doors in Hollywood for Fremantle. But Frot-Coutaz's quest for the next big hit was anything but smooth. The Swan, a show about ordinary women who undergo plastic surgery, bombed in 2004. "It's kind of a hairy show," says Mike Darnell, Fox's president of alternative entertainment. "I don't know any other way to say it. You are doing full-on surgery."

Nothing really seemed to pull in a huge audience until America's Got Talent. Now Frot-Coutaz is pinning her hopes on Hole in the Wall. "You have sort of several layers of comedy in the show, right?" she says excitedly. "There are the contestants in little shiny suits. They're visually interesting. Then you've got that moment when the wall comes out, and the reaction of the people when they see it. And then you've got the moment when they get dunked in the water!"

Um, maybe you have to see it to really appreciate it. Still, Frot-Coutaz's gut may be working for her again. If ever there was a time for an American version of one of those weird Japanese game shows in which contestants face ridiculous challenges and are humiliated if they fail, this is it. Versions of the show have already succeeded for Fremantle in China, Russia, and Argentina. This summer's biggest new program, ABC's Wipeout (a game show in which contestants try to survive a wacky obstacle course - or get knocked into a pool of water) drew its inspiration from this foreign genre. Another ABC show, I Survived a Japanese Gameshow, in which Americans were humiliated on actual Japanese game shows, didn't fare as well. But what do you expect? It was up against America's Got Talent.  

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