David W. Zucker on the Revolution That Could Change Television Forever

David W. Zucker has spent decades helping to bring some of television’s most ambitious stories to the screen, but even someone with his experience cannot predict what the business will look like several months from now.

“It changes by the month,” Zucker said when we met at the Italian Global Series Festival in Riccione.

As Chief Creative Officer at Scott Free Productions, Zucker has helped oversee an extraordinary collection of series, including The Good Wife, The Good Fight, BrainDead, The Man in the High Castle, Raised by Wolves, Alien: Earth, and The Terror. 

He has been with Scott Free for more than 25 years, which means he has witnessed television evolve from a primarily domestic business into an increasingly complicated global marketplace.

Zucker was in Italy to promote The Terror: Devil in Silver, the third installment of AMC’s acclaimed horror anthology, starring Dan Stevens, CCH Pounder, Stephen Root, Aasif Mandvi, and Judith Light. 

He also participated in two of the festival’s industry conversations, joining Nicholas Meyer for one discussion in Riccione and Steve Stark for another in Rimini.

That combination made Zucker a particularly fitting guest for a festival dedicated not only to celebrating television but also to examining where the medium is headed. 

The Italian Global Series Festival brought actors, writers, producers, showrunners, and other industry leaders together in Rimini and Riccione, creating exactly the kind of international exchange that Zucker believes has become essential to television’s future.

Scott Free understood the possibilities of global storytelling long before Netflix helped make international television readily available to American viewers. 

Zucker pointed to The Pillars of the Earth as an early example of the company building a production across borders, using German and Spanish financing and moving forward without an American or British buyer despite a cast that included Eddie Redmayne, Hayley Atwell, Matthew Macfadyen, and Donald Sutherland.

“We’d never made television that way,” Zucker recalled. “So we’ve always had this real enthusiasm and interest in partnering with other filmmakers and storytellers.”

That philosophy continues with projects such as The Terror and Alien: Earth, which can reach viewers across countries and cultures while inviting entirely different responses to the material.

“There was a really cynical era back during the studio period where studios were basically selling content, good and bad, to Europe and just kind of dumping all of it there,” Zucker said.

“I think this is a much more exciting time because you never know where, from South Korea to Scandinavia, that next exciting storyteller may come from.”

The irony is that television’s ability to connect with stories and creators around the world has expanded just as the traditional industry has become more cautious about what it is willing to make.

Zucker believes television has become too dependent on the feature-film model of building projects around existing intellectual property rather than the original ideas that once defined the medium. 

The Good Wife, created by Robert and Michelle King, came from writers entering a room with an idea rather than a recognizable franchise, sequel, or brand already attached.

“Television has gotten really drunk on the feature model of just IP, IP, where television historically was always about the original creator’s idea,” he said.

That growing conservatism is understandable in a business facing enormous financial pressure, corporate consolidation, disappearing outlets, and audiences scattered across more platforms than any reasonable person should need to locate one television show. 

But Zucker does not believe those restrictions will stop storytellers from finding ways to reach an audience.

“When talent gets restricted like that, the determination and the desperation to go out and tell that story, however it can be told, becomes that much more intense,” he said.

The place where many of those stories may emerge surprised me, largely because the television industry still rarely discusses it as a genuine competitor to traditional entertainment platforms.

YouTube came up repeatedly during our conversation.

Zucker sees the platform’s relationship with independent creators as something much larger than another shift in viewing habits. 

Without the traditional studio development process deciding which ideas audiences will be allowed to see, creators can take their work directly to viewers, and those viewers can discover storytellers from anywhere in the world.

“I think YouTube is going to push this evolution in a monstrous way, and using monstrous in a good reference,” Zucker said. 

“It will really democratize the types of stories that will be presented now because it doesn’t have to go through this development curation process of a studio that will determine what the audiences want.”

Zucker compared YouTube’s potential impact on television to the effect Jaws had on the movie business when it helped create the modern blockbuster.

“I do feel, in my lifetime, that is as big an event as Jaws was, where film was never the same after Jaws,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any question YouTube’s doing that.”

The question is no longer whether traditional broadcasters and studios recognize the money and audience migrating toward creator-driven platforms. It is how they will participate in that economy when creators may no longer need them in the same way.

That does not mean the old system has nothing left to offer. 

Zucker spoke warmly about watching Shōgun with his teenage children as it unfolded weekly, introducing them to another culture and leaving them eager to visit Japan. 

It was a reminder of what globally minded television can accomplish when networks and producers are willing to trust a story that does not resemble everything surrounding it.

The harder problem may be helping audiences find those stories. 

Younger viewers often care less about the company or platform releasing a series than the genre, actor, or subject drawing them toward it, which could eventually weaken the identities that networks and streaming services have spent years and billions of dollars trying to establish.

“They don’t really care about the destination,” Zucker said of his children. “For the most part, they just want to find either that story, that genre, that actor that everybody’s kind of talking about and that they want to sample.”

The industry Zucker described is unstable, fragmented, and moving faster than anyone can comfortably track, but he also sees enormous creative possibilities within that uncertainty. 

Television may be losing some of its familiar gatekeepers, yet storytellers are gaining new ways to work across borders and connect directly with viewers.

“The creators that we talk to, and they’re like, ‘I want to take this show out.’ It’s like, okay, well, we can do that now,” Zucker said. “If we talk about it in three months, it may be an entirely different environment. And that’s okay. But we just have to realize how quickly it’s changing.”

TV Fanatic’s coverage from the Italian Global Series Festival will continue with our conversations with The Terror: Devil in Silver star Judith Light, filmmaker Nicholas Meyer, and behind-the-scenes industry heavyweights including Marti Noxon and Carlton Cuse.

All of them offered their own perspectives on television’s past, present, and rapidly shifting future.