By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
“Bloodline” premiered on Netflix last weekend, and — as far as anyone outside the streaming giant’s office headquarters in Los Gatos, CA knows — no one watched it. Or 55 million people watched it. Most likely it’s somewhere in between, but because Netflix refuses to relinquish their viewing statistics, not even the creators of the series know how many people are watching it.
That’s just fine with Daniel Zelman, one of three co-creators of “Bloodline,” all of whom argue for their employer’s privacy to varying extremes. Glenn and Todd A. Kessler also don’t feel the need to see numbers, in part because knowing whether their first show — the FX drama “Damages” — was succeeding or failing in the ratings every week became a distraction.
In a sit-down interview with Indiewire, the three men who make up the oft-praised KZK Productions opened up about how they landed at Netflix, what they learned about twists from getting “in a lot of trouble” on “Damages,” and why it’s better for creators not to be beholden to the almighty Nielsens.
Was “Bloodline” always intended to be a Netflix show, or did you shop it around a bit?
But this show is less about those time manipulations and more, really, about the characters and how the characters evolve; so that time shift, for example, is not in every episode. Also, the past, in many ways, becomes as relevant in this show. In “Damages,” it was much more about the future and building events towards those future events. Here, there’s a future event, but at the same time we learn a lot about the family’s past, which informs not just the characters but also some of the events.
Part of our process is that we don’t have 13 scripts written ahead of time. We don’t even have 10 scripts written ahead of time. So there’s a lot of room for flexibility and improvisation within this structure of the story, and we have options for what might happen or options for what did happen that we keep alive until we have to make a decision. And there are even times when we’ll talk to an actor about, “What this means is this, and where we may be heading is here or here. We’re not going to betray anything you’ve done to date. Nothing we’ve told you, we’re going to say ‘Forget about that. I know you were playing that for three episodes, but we’re not doing that anymore. Now it’s this.'” We’re very on-guard against any kind of shaky ground for an actor, any sense that they thought they committed to an idea and now that idea is changing. We’re very actor-centric when it comes to making sure they feel that they’re on solid ground, and that the reality they’ve been playing is never going to be betrayed.
And our cast was very game for that. As Sissy [Spacek] was saying, it’s kind of a new process. It makes some people uncomfortable because they have their own process they want to bring to things, but there is a spontaneity to it, that we have seen in five seasons of “Damages” and even in this. There’s a life to it, and the actors that are game for working this way and can thrive working that way, it’s been very exciting to see what they bring to it.
Then when we started to cast it, it’s another level of amazing fortune that those people are available and interested and willing to move their lives. And those are the people who, when we were just sitting around, discussing conceptually who could play this character, turn out to be available. Same with Kyle. He became available and we were huge fans of his. And when we went out to cast Danny Rayburn, who’s played by Ben Mendelsohn, we had all been huge fans of Ben’s. He’s not a household name, not a widely-known actor, but we were very excited by his performances in everything that we saw him in. Oftentimes there are lists generated of who’s available, who’s looking to do something like this, but we only met with him to play the role of Danny. He had never done a series before, so there was concern about what would that mean, how does that work, all of that stuff. We had a few people like Sissy and Ben and Sam who had never done a series before, and that was very exciting for us to have the experience of their first experience with it. Because it’s very different than features.
Obviously, it’s even different than DVR. It’s there, it’s always there. I don’t know when you would report numbers. You have to report numbers over the life of it being on the site, as opposed to the first week or the second week. What numbers are you even reporting for Netflix? Our understanding about how people watch shows on Netflix is, they watch that, it’s like reading a novel. I won’t read another novel in the middle of reading this novel. So I’m not going to start a new TV series or show, whatever you want to call it, in the middle of something. I think people like the feeling of accomplishment; that “I’ve finished five seasons of ‘Lost’ and now I’m moving onto something else.” And if I’m on Season 2 of “Lost” and a new show comes on, I don’t know that I’m going to stop to weigh in on the other show.
READ MORE: Kyle Chandler & Ben Mendelsohn on ‘Full Contact’ Acting in ‘Bloodline’
By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.