EXCLUSIVE: HBO Max is starting to build its new original drama slate with projects developed under the model introduced by the streamer’s Emmy-winning The Pitt, which involves 15+ episodes per season, a modest budget and yearly release.
The first two projects, which have received pilot orders are cop drama American Blue, from former Supernatural showrunner Jeremy Carver, and family drama How To Survive Without Me (working title), from top TV creator/producer Greg Berlanti, Bash Doran (Life After Life) and Robbie Rogers (Fellow Travelers). Both hail from Warner Bros. Television, where Carver and Berlanti Productions are under overall deals.
Written by Carver, who executive produces with Brian Udovich, American Blue centers on native son Brian “Milk” Milkovich who returns to his hometown of Joliet, Illinois, to rescue a beleaguered police force while seeking redemption of his own.
The cop show evokes such classics in the genre as Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, said HBO Max Head of Originals Sarah Aubrey.
“It’s very much in that vein where you really get to know these police officers and understand that they are members of this community that they’re serving. But also it is very much in the streets, on their feet, doing the job in 2025,” she said.
Carver and his producing partner Udovich have spent a lot of time in Joliet, located 40 miles southwest of Chicago, with the local cops.
“We always love that kind of very specific storytelling,” Aubrey said. “It’s one of the secrets to the success of The Pitt so it’s exciting to us that Jeremy and Brian have done that deep dive.”
How To Survive Without Me (wt), was written by Berlanti and Doran from a story the duo co-wrote with Rogers; the trio executive produce with Berlanti Productions’ Sarah Schechter and Leigh London Redman.
“Greg is legend in the world of television,” Aubrey said. “He was eager and we were eager to go back to his family drama roots ala Brothers and Sisters,” she added, referencing the well-received 2006 ABC series, on which Berlanti was a writer, executive producer and showrunner.
As for outside influences, “we also talk about Six Feet Under as a touchstone,” Aubrey said about How To Survive Without Me. “This show is essentially about a group of adult siblings and their father, about grief and love and their lives in Los Angeles.”
With its theme, the series also draws some parallels to Berlanti’s first series as a creator, Everwood, a family drama about a widower and his adolescent kids.
“People would want to live and be a part of this family, and when you have 15 episodes, you can really settle into that,” Aubrey said. “They’re aspirational, they’re inspirational, how they work through their problems together, and I think people are gravitating towards shows with those kinds of themes these days with the tumult of the world.”
Like The Pitt, How To Survive Without Me will film in Los Angeles.
‘Brothers & Sisters’ (from left): Rachel Griffiths, Sally Field
ABC
This marks the second pilot order for Berlanti and Doran this year in addition to Hulu’s YA mystery Foster Dade, which they executive produce with Rogers. Berlanti also has Stillwater with a series order at Amazon.
In success, cop drama American Blue and family drama How To Survive Without Me could both go to series, joining HBO Max’s sole current original drama offering, medical drama The Pitt, from ER alums Noah Wyle, G. Scott Gemmill and John Wells, which won five Emmys for its first season, including Outstanding Drama Series.
There are other projects in the works under The Pitt model, including legal shows for a full gamut of the classic drama series genres — all through a 2025 perspective. They combine serialized and procedural elements.
“Family soaps are much more serialized but with the other kind of workplace shows, our goal is to have a close-ended story in every episode, like The Pitt does. The Pitt has very long-running stories mixed with resolution and people being treated in one episode,” Aubrey said, calling close-ended storytelling “not as limitation, but as a feature.”
With the focus currently on American Blue and How To Survive Without Me, it will likely take awhile before another pilot greenlight, though Aubrey left the door slightly open should an exciting prospect come along.
“We will look at pilots for next year for sure,” she said.
Aubrey, who oversees HBO Max’s original drama series, spoke to Deadline about the model previously revealed by Casey Bloys, Chairman and CEO, HBO and HBO Max Content. Aubrey, who also is shepherding the Warner Bros. IP-based series for HBO that stream on HBO Max, spoke of how the HBO Max original dramas with budgets believed to be about $4M an episode will fit into the slate alongside big-budget HBO tentpoles like Harry Potter, which she said is “chugging along.”
Also commenting on the template is Clancy Collins White, President, Creative Affairs of Warner Bros. Television which produces the project developed under it, including The Pitt and the two pilots.
The duo also teased what to expect from Season 2 of The Pitt.
How did the model come about?
AUBREY: Casey and I saw this white space in the streaming landscape of people not making network-style shows with 15+ episodes that return annually. And both of those are very important factors, because one, with 15 episodes, you really give people an opportunity to sink into a world. It’s one of the reasons why certain older shows, people binge them like crazy, because they’re able to watch more than eight episodes every two years.
We saw that and thought, Oh, this is this is an opportunity, and made that bet that audiences would flock to that kind of storytelling. And simultaneously, John and Scott and Noah were really itching to tell a story set in a hospital in 2025, that was the very important part to them, what does medicine look like today post-Covid, and their kind of creative passion we always really want. We can have ideas about shows that are going to work but we always need partners that have a real focus and passion about the story they want to tell. So, this all aligned perfectly, and The Pitt is the result.
Warner Bros. TV was part of the process of the get-go, starting the initial conversations with Wells, Gemmill and Wyle.
COLLINS WHITE: Everybody was really energized and excited about the idea of trying to come up with a model that allowed us to do more episodes than just the six or eight or 10 we’ve been used to doing on streaming, and which come out on a weekly basis. And most importantly, producing these for a reasonable budget and to be able to get back on the air on a yearly cadence, which is so important for audiences, who, I think, have become increasingly frustrated by the fact that they love shows, but then there are only eight-to-10 episodes, and they’re going to have to wait for two years for another season to come on.
‘The Pitt’ team onstage at the Emmys
Christopher Polk
Introducing “prestigurals”
While The Pitt was still in the works, HBO Max had started developing more shows under the same business paradigm but people in the industry were skeptical at first, employing a wait and see attitude.
AUBREY: And then once The Pitt came out, creators, agents, etc, saw what we wanted to do, and that John and Scott had taken a tried and true network model but updated it in terms of character complexity and this unique style that is quasi, almost documentary, all in one day, hour by hour. Creators saw the ambition of what we were doing inside of a tried-and-true format. As a result, we are continuing to look at those tested genres, specifically cop shows, legal shows, family shows, and seeing how we can continue to engage this audience that’s come for The Pitt.
Interestingly, the thing that The Pitt did that is unusual and exciting, it engaged our core prestige audience but also broadened and really grabbed onto viewers that were coming to the service more for a movie or our library, and really hooked them in. Because of the 15 episodes and having time to build the word of mouth about the quality of the show, we were getting everyone by the end. That breadth of audience from these types of shows is important to us and to our business model.
With the slate growing, we may need a name for the shows developed under the new template. Prestige broadcast-adjacent series, perhaps, in light of The Pitt’s Emmy triumph?
AUBREY: People bristle at the word procedural, because for a while that had negative connotations to it. I’ve heard some people call it “prestigurals,” which I just laugh at because I think that’s kind of funny. But honestly, it’s a very particular kind of muscle that people have not been exercising in a while — and very few can do it — which is to do this many episodes, but, because of the quality of streaming shows, with this updated character depth and stylishness to it.
So I don’t really have a one size fits all word for that, but I think people understand pretty clearly that it’s scratching a different itch from, you know, I said shows that come back, that have big, marvelous scope and kind of epic world building, but have shorter episode counts and get a long time in between those seasons.
HBO Max has its own big tentpole series with shorter orders and long stretches between seasons in HBO’s Game Of Thrones franchise, The Last Of Us and Harry Potter, among others. The Pitt and the other HBO Max dramas in that mold are designed to provide viewing opportunities for fans awaiting for the next tentpole.
AUBREY: We’re excited by the broader audience that these shows are bringing in. It’s a very complimentary strategy.
Pilots’ comeback
While The Pitt had a straight-to-series order, American Blue and How To Survive Without Me are pilots, part of a resurgence of the broadcast development staple.
AUBREY: I wasn’t at HBO then, but HBO held onto doing pilots for a long time, even when things were being ordered straight-to-series when the streaming wars were starting.
HBO famously offered a pilot order to House of Cards and was outbid by Netflix, which gave it a two-season series order to announce itself and kick off the streaming wars.
AUBREY: They’re a really useful, important tool, because we’re not running a bake-off in an old school network way, we are very particular about what we pick up to pilot. We’ve really done the work on the scripts and the shape of the season, so it’s not, let’s shoot eight and pick up one, that’s not the intention. That said, especially when you’re being ambitious — one thing I love about The Pitt, and we definitely want to continue to see in these shows, is these very fresh faces and building out big ensembles and getting a chance in a pilot to see who’s popping, what’s working, how do you shape the show accordingly. It’s just a very important proof of concept in all those respects, and an educational tool for the showrunners, who are building something that they have to make 15 episodes of and return very quickly, and that’s just a different kind of engine. So I think for all of us, both creative and practical purposes, it’s a great tool that we’re excited to take advantage of.
Will pilots be the default development path with straight-to-series orders as the exception?
AUBREY: We don’t really make hard and fast rules about anything, that’s the beauty of being nimble and responsive to whatever walks in the door. We are known for taking our time with development, I’m sure sometimes that drives people crazy, but I also think it’s why we have a pretty consistent pipeline of quality. So the pilot is just one part of that overall operating system and a tool to be used. I don’t think it’s like, part of that has to be a pilot now, but we’re excited about pilots.
There is no exact target number for many of The Pitt-style dramas HBO Max wants to have in rotation each year.
AUBREY: When there are great scripts that are ready, we will shoot pilots and hopefully go to series. But we’re very deliberate in that development as we are with everything else, so I don’t think you’re all of a sudden going to see the faucet turned on and have seven of these shows on. But our commitment is to developing a robust slate where they can hand off to each other over the course of a year, so that you have several for that audience that is coming specifically for this kind of show and our core audience.
HBO Max-WBTV partnership & leaning on veteran showrunners
Like The Pitt, which produces 15 episodes a season, if American Blue and How To Survive Without Me are picked up to series, they too will be making at least that many at a similar budget, which, as mentioned, is believed to be $4M an episode.
AUBREY: I’m not going to opine about the budgets. But yes. Part of it is not just the money spent on the show, but part of it is the nature of the show itself. To make 15 episodes, you have to build a lean and mean machine to do that. So the goal is to replicate what John did so well on The Pitt but also what TV used to be, it just hasn’t been that for a while. The other great part of it for us is we have wonderful partners in Warner Brothers, and they’re experts at this, they’ve been doing it forever. Working with Channing [Dungey] and Clancy and their teams and their creators on this budget model with this many episodes is such a great company-aligned way of working, and we’re thrilled to be continuing.
Working with Warner Bros. TV also gives HBO Max access to the studio’s roster of talent, including seasoned showrunners like Wells, Gemmill, Berlanti and Carver who have done broadcast dramas that deliver 22 episodes a year on a broadcast-size budget.
AUBREY: They’ve been in business with people that have done these kinds of shows for a long time. And I don’t think it’s an accident that these are established showrunners, because it’s hard to do this, there’s a real rigor to breaking story at a certain pace, making sure that it’s producible. I think that John and Scott and Noah make something very complicated look elegant and easy, which is telling a character story in the middle of medical action.
Everything that a doctor does in The Pitt is filtered through how their character would practice medicine in that moment, and that’s a real skill in a big ensemble show. I think that, for all those reasons, the production model, the budget, the scope of the ensemble, the number of episodes and annual return, it really leads you to people that have done it before and have that experience.
Is sibling Warner Bros. TV an exclusive studio partner on the model or is HBO Max open to outside suppliers too?
AUBREY: We are absolutely prioritizing working with Warner Brothers on these shows, and our development reflects that, both because we prioritize it and they’re doing a great job of bringing us interesting things. We would never rule out or make a hard-and-fast rule, we are only doing shows with Warner Brothers. I would say the vast majority are with them, and we plan for them to be with them, but we always leave room for something interesting to walk in the door.
Clancy Collins White
Warner Bros. Television.
The model from studio perspective
For shows to fit into The Pitt framework, they are conceived and developed that way at Warner Bros. TV.
COLLINS WHITE: It’s about how these shows are built from the ground up. The common ingredients are incredible storytellers who are excited about trying to make a series that feels authentic and realistic, and maybe feels familiar, but in a way that also feels elevated and sophisticated. We used to always talk a lot in the past about what’s an updated variation on a familiar theme. And I think that’s what The Pitt offers, and which you can do in other genres. It’s an opportunity to take something and really elevate it and make it feel like this is a different way to do a character-based drama that feels like a streaming show.
The Pitt also made headlines with its unusual fixed-fee cast payment system, one of many facets the studio employed to work within a limited budget, helped by the large (for streaming) episode count.
COLLINS WHITE: There’s a budget for a show that spans a particular season. Having more episodes, as you well know, allows you to amortize those costs over more episodes, which is always helpful. But certainly, as was the case with The Pitt, you need to be very intentional when you go in and say, ‘this show is going to be at this price point,’ so everybody needs to be aware and cognizant of that. If it’s a show about police, how many days are we on stages, and how many days are we on location, what does our casting budget look like, are we shooting in a rebate state, or are we trying to shoot this in Los Angeles? These are all the conversations you have in conjunction with your partners to be able to make the highest quality show at a responsible budget.
Coming out of the strikes in particular and in a business that’s changing constantly, in order to succeed, we have to be adaptable, we have to be nimble, we’ve got to be willing to pivot. Everyone’s trying to make television responsibly.
‘The Pitt’s “Spectacular” Second Season
After having a long time to work on Season 1, The Pitt team had to go back and do another 15-episode season on a tight schedule. Can they sustain the quality at that volume and quick turnaround? Collins White and Aubrey share their early reactions to Season 2, which premieres in January.
COLLINS WHITE: It’s really spectacular. They’ve added some cast members, so that’s been exciting, but we still have the cast that we love. And yes, in my humble opinion, they can absolutely sustain it.
AUBREY: They’re not resting on their morals, I’ll say that much, they are going for it yet again. Dana (Katherine LaNasa) and Robby (Wyle) have very juicy stories this season, they are dealing with new challenges. And that last season day, it’s not like, oh, we forgot that it ever happened, it’s a new day, hit the reset button. They both are carrying baggage from that.
I don’t want to ruin too much, but they’re evolving the show in a very organic and surprising way. And there are, rest assured, medical cases that you cannot rip your eyes from, even if you want to sometimes. I’m very excited.
‘The Pitt’ Model Is Here To Stay
Even with all ratings and awards success of The Pitt, HBO Max and WBTV will not change the perimeters and raise the show’s budget beyond the mandated union increases.
COLLINS WHITE: The whole purpose of this is to continue to do the show at a responsible budget.
AUBREY: I think the TV God smiled on us with The Pitt. It is pretty unusual to try something new and have it have this result. Obviously that’s not going to happen every time out of the gate, but we’re very committed to this strategy and to the audience that we brought in. So much more to come.