Ideas Are the Ideal

Thom Sherman was pursuing the Hollywood limelight when he decided he’d rather be the executive green-lighting a show than the actor auditioning for it.

After appearing in small theater productions in Los Angeles, Sherman took a job as assistant to David Peckinpah, executive producer of the 1990s crime drama Silk Stalkings. He eventually was hired at ABC, where he rose to senior vice-president of drama development before moving to Bad Robot Productions and then being recruited by Dawn Ostroff to work on the launch of the CW.

Today, Sherman is executive vice-president at the CW, overseeing the development of all new primetime scripted and non-scripted programming under president Mark Pedowitz. The partnership caps a familiar collaboration, as Pedowitz was formerly president of ABC Studios.

“Mark was my first business-affairs guru,” Sherman says, in his Burbank office. “He’s the best at making deals. Mark was running Touchstone when I was running J.J. Abrams’s company [Bad Robot]. When he took a break from Touchstone to produce independently, he pitched Bad Robot a couple of shows and we worked together creatively.”

Under Pedowitz, the CW has expanded original programming, launched a summer schedule and inked deals with Netflix and Hulu to increase its presence in the digital and social-media space. And his strategy to attract more male viewers has resulted in broader offerings to its target 18-to-34 audience, Sherman notes.

This past season, new hits like Jane the Virgin and The Flash garnered critical acclaim, while returning shows like Arrow, Supernatural and The 100 have continued to impress.

“We want high-concept, fantasy or genre pieces with a hook that can be marketed,” Sherman says. “Television was founded on great soap opera, and younger demographics crave that kind of thing. They want relatable characters going through issues they’re going through, or aspire to experience.”

Sherman strives to support his writers, but he also brings strong opinions to projects, trusting his own instincts about what succeeds on television, from character formation to story beats.

Television tends to be formulaic, he acknowledges, so the best writers are constantly trying to upend expectations. And airing shows whose themes reflect the zeitgeist and resound in pop culture is the CW’s programming goal.

“We’re a little bit more of a niche place,” he says, “but our aspiration is to be the best. Creating TV shows should be hard. Everyone’s pouring money into something that millions will see. It’s important to go deep into the ideas.”