The Falvey Home is Where the Heart Is

James Caan is on the phone again. Just five minutes after chatting about husband-and-wife TV executives Justin and Samie Falvey, the durable movie tough-guy has decided he has something to add.

Caan and the Falveys have past and present ties: Justin, co-president of DreamWorks/Amblin Television, worked with the actor on his former NBC series, Las Vegas, while Samie is executive vice president of comedy development, ABC Entertainment Group, home of Caan’s new sitcom, Back in the Game.

But that’s not all, he explains in the callback. “Justin and Samie are both friends,” he says. “They’d be my friends if they were shoemakers. That’s the kind of people they are — good to be around.”

The same unassuming air swirls around the Falvey home — a two-story Mediterranean in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Despite the inherent grandeur of the 1922 vintage home — curved staircase, ebony floors, stained glass windows, swimming pool, cabana with outdoor fireplace — there is nothing imposing or pretentious about this place. Mid-century modern chairs and light fixtures soften the formal style of the five-bedroom house, and rooms look more work-in-progress than decorator-perfect.
 
Then there’s the art collection. The walls are lined with contemporary works by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Jennifer Bartlett, Robert Motherwell and Alyson Shotz (Samie’s mother is a Philadelphia–based art dealer). But there is nothing museum-like here. Over the living room fireplace, a whimsical glass piece by Rob Wynne spells the word whoops! while among a grouping of framed pieces hangs a favorite abstract by a young L.A. artist.

“That’s a Theo J. Falvey,” says Samie, referring to their two-year-old son. “I think he has great technique.” (Their other son, Jace, five, is also represented in the mix.}
 Clearly, this couple works hard and lives well — but they don’t take themselves too seriously.

“They’re both easy to talk to and get the joke. And they’re smart. So they’re fun to collaborate with,” says writer-producer Jonathan Groff, who worked with Justin on the NBC animated series Father of the Pride and, more recently, with Samie on the ABC comedy Happy Endings. “They genuinely like what they do — and what you do as a writer.”

“They have good taste and they’re nice people,” pronounces writer-producer Judd Apatow, who worked with Justin on DreamWorks Television’s first series, Freaks and Geeks — the cult classic that ran on NBC in 1999–2000 — as well as its 2001–02 follow-up Fox series, Undeclared, on which Samie was the executive in charge.

“As a creative person, you have to find people who ‘get’ you,” Apatow continues. “Personally, I wish everyone was like them because they understand what it takes to make strong, innovative television. And they want showrunners to succeed and have their visions get through this crazy process.”

If the Falveys are focused on doing good work, that may stem from the fact that both grew up on the East Coast without any connection to show business.

Justin was raised in the Boston suburb of Wellesley, where his father was a dentist; he attended D.C.’s Georgetown University, majoring in psychology and business marketing. “[But] I was always reading Entertainment Weekly and books about the business, particularly television.”

After graduation in 1991, he lived in Tokyo, then Barcelona, teaching English and traveling. In 1994 he made the move to L.A. to tackle TV.

“My parents thought I was out of my mind,” he recalls. “I moved here the day after the Northridge earthquake. My dad woke me up the morning of the quake and said, ‘I don’t think you’re moving to Los Angeles — it may have disappeared into the ocean.’

I called LAX and they said, ‘We’re going to be up and running in five hours.’ I continued packing. There was two feet of snow on the ground and everybody was sick. I was counting the hours till I left.”

He knew two people in L.A. — one was Eddy Yablans, an agent at ICM, who’d been ahead of him at Georgetown. “Eddy said, ‘There’s a guy downstairs who is out of his mind. He’s fired everybody who’s worked for him. But if you survive with him, it’ll be the best thing that ever happened.’ And he introduced me to Ari Emanuel.”
 
Falvey remembers that Emanuel — later immortalized by Jeremy Piven as Ari Gold on HBO’s Entourage and now co–CEO of William Morris Endeavor — told him, “Sit on my couch, watch me and decide if you want anything to do with me.” Falvey sat and watched — “he was pacing around doing his Ari thing” — and then took the job.

“The first two months were brutal, and I wanted to quit every day,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what was going on — [Emanuel] was yelling and screaming. But once I figured out who was important and whose call he should take, it became a lot of fun. And he’s been a great mentor to this day.”

“I always say, Ari took his hair,” Samie jokes, referring to Justin’s smooth pate.

Falvey (everyone calls him that, including his wife) worked for Emanuel for less than a year before taking a job as an assistant to Jamie Tarses, then a development executive at NBC.

He soon joined her then-husband, Dan McDermott, as a creative executive at DreamWorks. “I had to interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg, and I was completely freaked out,” he says. “That was the week [in March 1995 that] Steven [Spielberg], Jeffrey and David Geffen were on the cover of Time magazine — the company was just starting.”

It’s also where he met Darryl Frank, now Falvey’s partner as co-president of DreamWorks Television. “You mean, his other wife,” Samie teases.

“Our job at that point was just meeting and greeting writers,” Falvey says. “Then as time passed, we were assigned different shows and projects — and kind of grew together — and Jeffrey had always said that when Dan, who was writing, leaves, you guys will get your shot.” 

It’s been ten years since Falvey and Frank took over DreamWorks Television, reporting first to Katzenberg and, following the splitting off of the animation unit, to Spielberg.

“We do not have any deals with anybody, by Steven’s choice,” Falvey explains. “It allows us to be very independent, and we have five shows on five different networks. We can have an idea — whether Steven’s idea, our idea or the writer’s idea — bring it to whatever network we want to sell it to and then lay it off at their in-house studio so they own the show with us.”

Diversity is key at DreamWorks. The company has produced a range of series for broadcast and cable — Freaks & Geeks, Spin City, United States of Tara, Smash, The Americans, Falling Skies.

In addition, there have been notable miniseries — Into the West, Band of Brothers, The Pacific and the recent summer surprise, Under the Dome, which has received a season-two order from CBS.

“Steven and Jeffrey have maintained from the beginning that we’re not looking for fastballs down the middle,” Falvey continues. “If you look at our shows, there’s not a straightforward cop procedural.”

He speaks with his usual high energy — easily matched by that of his wife. “He’s the only person I’ve ever met who has more energy than me,” Samie says, though, in truth, she speaks faster.

Born in Boston, the former Samie Kim grew up in Philadelphia in the blended family that formed following the divorce of her Korean-American parents. As a kid, she watched a lot of television — Growing Pains, Moonlighting, thirtysomething — and remembers it as “magic in this box.”

As she grew, so did her interest in TV. “I was drawn to the fact that there were so many channels and types of shows. On a gut level, I sensed how dynamic it was as a business.”

Though she was desperate to attend college in L.A., her parents didn’t let her go farther than Kenyon College in Ohio. Since there was no film department, she majored in English and lobbied to spend a semester in New York, where she interned at NBC. After graduation in 1996, she headed west and became an NBC page in Burbank. 

At the time, Seinfeld was winding down, but Friends and Will & Grace were still going strong. A stint in marketing plunged her into “network boot camp,” where she also learned about branding and scheduling. Her big break — for which she credits Doug Herzog, David Nevins and Craig Erwich — came when Fox hired her as manager of current programming in 1999.

Herzog (now president of Viacom Entertainment Group) was Fox’s president of entertainment while Nevins (now president of entertainment, Showtime Networks) was executive vice president of programming. Erwich (now executive vice president, Warner Horizon Television) was then Fox’s vice president of current programming. They took a chance on Samie, though she had no primetime experience.

Clearly that bet paid off. After four years, Samie rose to vice president, comedy development. In 2006 she moved to ABC while the alphabet network was revitalizing its comedy department.
 
“It was really a hard time for comedy,” she says. “But I loved stand-up, I loved tapings, I loved single camera. And there were a few things I knew when I got there — ABC had women [viewers] and the family comedy was their legacy, even though it was just the uncoolest thing at the time.” 

The success of Modern Family and The Middle in 2009, followed by Suburgatory in 2011, changed that. And this season, the new slate is loaded with family- and female-oriented sitcoms, including The Goldbergs, Trophy Wife, Back in the Game and Super Fun Night.

It was during her tenure at Fox that she met Falvey, who was then shepherding Apatow’s Undeclared. They were each having a business lunch at the hilltop Mulholland Grill when they were first introduced. He was smitten but kept things professional. However, that didn’t stop him from using any excuse to send her emails. “I fell for her very quickly,” he says.

“I would get status updates from him three times a day before Facebook and Twitter [made it popular],” she says. “You begin to look for them after a while. Like, where is he now?  What is he wearing today? Some emails were really sweet and some showed he had no game whatsoever, which was endearing in its own way.”

After one season, Undeclared was canceled. Says Falvey: “That was my opportunity to strike.” Their first official date coincided with Memorial Day weekend, 2002.

“I told him I wanted to go to Big Sur,” Samie says. “And he said, ‘Invite me and I’ll drive.’ I knew it was great when it was Monday afternoon and we both had to work Tuesday and we were halfway through an eight-mile hike, lying on the beach, taking a nap, feeling so irresponsible. And neither of us was worried or stressed. I thought, All right! This is my speed.”

Three years later, Samie Kim became Samie Falvey with a wedding in Philadelphia. In the eight years since, they’ve managed to balance two high-pressure careers and the demands of family life. “The fact that we both work in the television business and have a deep understanding of what the other person is going through works well,” Falvey says.

“We’ve learned to divide and conquer,” she explains. “One of us takes our five-year-old to school every day, and one of us is home for dinner every night. We have a nanny during the week, but on weekends we’re home together and there’s no help — it’s us and the family.”

“It’s chaos, like every household,” Samie says. “Screaming up the stairs, throwing clothes down the stairs, trying to get everybody to eat breakfast.”

Admittedly, working in the same business can get tricky at times.

“I just went through a pilot season where I had a comedy [at ABC] I was passionate about that didn’t get picked up that I thought should have,” says Falvey — though the DreamWorks drama Lucky 7 did land on ABC’s fall lineup. 

For her part, Samie is careful to avoid any hint of personal bias or conflict of interest. “Sometimes I scrutinize his stuff more closely than somebody who is not my husband,” she admits.

Which doesn’t make it easy for anyone. “There are moments during pilot season when it’s better if we actually don’t talk [about work],” he says.

But generally, they value the plus sides of their two TV-career marriage.

“The volume of material that comes across her desk is amazing,” Falvey says. “I have the opportunity to come home and say, ‘What do you think about this area? Is this something interesting? Or is it an idea that has been beaten to death?’”

“It’s insightful information for me as a producer,” he continues, “to then challenge my writer or team and say, ‘We need to get this show and this pitch into a place where it’s speaking to our audience at this specific network.’”

Samie has learned from his example, as well.

“We always joke that we work in the failure business,” she says. “So much of what you pour your blood, sweat and tears into doesn’t actually go — or goes and then gets canceled.”

Still, her husband is genuinely an optimistic person, Samie shares. “Being told ‘no’ constantly is really difficult. But he doesn’t lose faith in his vision and in good ideas and good talent. I think that’s what being a great producer is.”

Not only is Falvey still enthused about his job after eighteen years at DreamWorks, he is encouraged by recent changes in the industry. “If you look at where the television business is today qualitatively, it’s incredible,” he raves.

“It’s some of the best work being done in entertainment — the quality of the writing, the directing and the acting,” Falvey says. “The change in landscape is happening so rapidly, it’s forcing people out of their comfort zone. Our deals with Under the Dome, Amazon Prime, Netflix — that is exciting.”

“And we’re experiencing all of that together,” says Samie, who in July was promoted from senior vice president to her current position as executive vice president and given added responsibility for international scripted development.

The next couple of years are going to be truly interesting, she says. “The models are going to change. Look at the things that have happened in the past year alone — from Amazon putting all their pilots online to Netflix putting out their series all at once. It’s the Wild West now.”

The discussion ends as five-year-old Jace runs in, kisses Mommy and Daddy, then disappears to snack on pizza.

“Life gets in the way of conversation sometimes,” Samie says, “which is healthy.”

And as they contemplate the future, the couple confesses to a few personal wishes for their young children. “We hope they have my hair and his disposition,” Samie says. And Falvey — true to form — nods, laughing.