NBC’s Post-NFL Game Plan: Universal TV Bets Big on ‘Suits LA’-Anchored Trifecta | Exclusive

Faced with the annual challenge of a Sunday lineup left bare by the end of football season, NBC’s ambitious 2025 plan to fill the night will replace the ratings juggernaut with three very different new shows: “Suits LA,” the anticipated spinoff to the cable darling turned streaming sensation; “Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” a murder-mystery dramedy with a “Desperate Housewives” flare; and “The Americas,” a nature docuseries narrated by Tom Hanks.

Rather than centering the Sunday-night lineup around one TV franchise or genre — like the “must-see TV” comedy lineup that housed hits like “Friends,” “Parks and Recreation” and “30 Rock” — NBCUniversal is betting that three diverse shows in one night will appeal to a broad audience both for the linear network and its sibling Peacock, which will stream the shows the day after premiere.

“What we’re doing with these three shows is ‘eventizing,’ making people sit up and pay attention,” Beatrice Springborn, president of Universal Content Productions and Universal International Studios, told TheWrap in an exclusive interview with the heads of the three units responsible for the effort. “What makes it an event is that it is unexpected.”

Launching a new television series usually looks very different on broadcast television. A show premiering midseason is often paired with one of the network’s reliably strong ratings performers — like “The Voice” or “Law & Order: SVU” — in the hopes that a wide audience will keep watching after their show ends and get hooked by those first few episodes.

But an overcrowded television landscape, even in the midst of overall Hollywood contraction, makes debuting new shows increasingly challenging. Not only do networks need to offer a compelling series, they also have to make a big enough splash to get audiences to tune in.

That’s behind NBC’s decision to combine the debut of these shows — all in-house productions from NBCUniversal’s studio arm.

The most unexpected factor in this strategy, however, is how NBCUniversal is not putting the bulk of its faith on the surefire hit “Suits LA,” a UCP and Hypnotic production spawned from a record-breaking streaming resurgence for Aaron Korsh’s USA Network series “Suits.” The spotlight is instead over “The Americas,” a 10-part nature docuseries from Universal Alternative Television Studios that marks the network’s first foray into the genre and that took five years to produce.

“We’ve taken a big risk as a company, specifically behind ‘The Americas,’ to do something this big, on this scale, this budget, this amount of time. It’s unprecedented,” Toby Gorman, president of Universal Television Alternative Studio, said.

Though scheduling decisions are made by NBC, Springborn, Gorman and Erin Underhill, president of Universal Television Studios — who all work under Pearlena Igbokwe to lead the Universal Studio Group — were bullish about debuting tentpole shows from their respective studios on the same night. Ahead of the Feb. 23 launch of NBC’s new Sunday night lineup, TheWrap spoke exclusively with the studio heads about bringing the shows to life, making hit series for outside buyers and obstacles to Hollywood’s growing #StayinLA movement, a campaign to champion local production initiated after the L.A. wildfires.

“The Americas” crown jewel

The bar is set high for the Sunday lineup, coming on the heels of a ratings-high season of “Sunday Night Football,” which pulled its best viewership since 2015 with an average 21.6 million viewers across NBC and Peacock; and last week’s “SNL50” celebration, which scored 14.8 million viewers.

On a typical broadcast TV primetime lineup, the 8 p.m. timeslot is reserved for the show with the broadest appeal — the best bet to attract viewers and potentially encourage them to stick around to watch the shows that follow. For NBC’s new Sunday nights, that honor goes to “The Americas.”

A co-production between UTAS and the BBC, the show marks the first time a wildlife docuseries has chronicled the entirety of the American continents from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Production involved 180 filming expeditions across five years, and it boasts Oscar winner Hanks as its narrator and an original score by Oscar and Grammy winner Hans Zimmer.

Gorman called the project “a huge investment” across NBCUniversal in terms of production and support, without providing specifics on the financials. The show will debut with a two-hour premiere at 7 p.m. ET/PT. The companywide push for “The Americas” also involves a massive simulcast of the first hour across NBCUniversal sibling networks Bravo, CNBC, E!, SYFY and USA (four of which are set to spin off from NBCU in the near future). The show will also release a one-hour behind-the-scenes special featuring Hanks and the filmmaking crew on April 21, following its broadcast finale and exclusively on Peacock.

“We have to get the affiliates’ permission to do something like this, and it’s easier to get them to agree to let us do one show … Hopefully it will help drive people to tune in for the second hour on NBC, which will then help ‘Suits’ and ‘Grosse Pointe,’” Steve Kern, NBC’s SVP of programming and scheduling, told TheWrap. “Then we’ll never be able to do it again, because the cable networks will be part of another company.”

“I think the measure of success for us will be how it does on Peacock and the splash we make collectively over the 11-episode run [across platforms],” Gorman said. “It’s going to take a bit of time to see whether it’s something we can do again … There’s going to be lots of data to gather.”

A spinoff and a murder mystery

NBC’s Sunday 9 p.m. slot will house “Suits LA,” one of the most anticipated shows of the 2024-25 TV season. After the original “Suits” became the most-watched show on streaming in 2023 after being added to Netflix’s library (the show also streams on Peacock), creator Aaron Korsh got the offer to expand its universe with a completely new story.

The result is a spinoff series led by “Arrow” and “Heels” star Stephen Amell centered around the world of entertainment law.

“The challenge was, how do you continue to iterate on a show that had so much success and been so in the zeitgeist, especially over the past few years? And we’ve done it by bringing back the exact same writing staff that Aaron had, and also bringing in a new flavor, being set in Los Angeles,” Springborn said. “You get the snappy dialogue and fast pace of the ‘Suits’ you know and love, but add in the entertainment world, dealing with actors, musicians and sports figures … I think it will satisfy the original ‘Suits’ fans and bring in a whole new audience.”

That’s followed by “Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” an original murder mystery set in suburban Michigan. The dramedy, from “Good Girls” creator Jenna Bans and Bill Krebs, follows four members of a garden club who end up bonded by a murderous secret.

The series stars Melissa Fumero (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), Aja Naomi King (“How to Get Away With Murder”), Ben Rappaport (“For the People”) and AnnaSophia Robb (“The Carrie Diaries”), mixing comedy, camp and high-stakes drama.

“It felt like we were missing that sort of ‘Desperate Housewives’ or ‘How to Get Away With Murder’-type shows in broadcast … With Jenna and Bill, we knew they would be able to capture this tone. It’s a little bit of a high-wire act,” Underhill said. “It also has a real visual flourish. It’s going to look and feel different than other things on broadcast television.”

“Stay in LA” and selling to everyone

Aside from rolling the dice with their tentpole shows, the Universal studio executives also spoke about the growing #StayinLA movement, which aims to bring back production jobs to Southern California with a call for studios and streamers to commit to at least 10% more local production over the next three years. The effort gathered significant momentum after the Palisades and Altadena wildfires left thousands without homes, amassing 15,000 signatures, including Hollywood luminaries like Keanu Reeves and director Patti Jenkins.

The new shows created more than 6,000 above- and below-the-line jobs among cast and crew, according to the company.

“Suits LA” filmed its pilot in Canada, and moved production to Los Angeles after landing a series order at NBC and a tax incentive. Springborn also touted production of the Peacock hit comedy series “Ted” being based in the Universal lot. And though the 13-episode first season of “Grosse Pointe Garden Society” is filming in Atlanta, Underhill said hit Universal Television series like comedies “St. Denis Medical” and “Hacks” are produced in Southern California.

“A lot of it comes down to the access to the tax credit and what the city and state are giving us,” Springborn said. “There’s a lot we can do in terms of maximizing production on the Universal lot, and we can control more of the costs there, which is helpful … But hopefully expanding on those state and citywide incentives is what helps keep production here.”

“I think it is going to take locking arms amongst all the studios and city officials to really figure this out, because it’s not an easy problem but it’s paramount to our state,” Underhill added. “It would be great if there were some other levers to pull to help with the cost to stay local.”

Though UTAS keeps its unscripted productions mostly in-house — including USA Network series “Scare Tactics,” produced by Jordan Peele, and the upcoming competition series “Destination X,” hosted by Jeffrey Dean Morgan — Universal Television and UCP also continue to produce shows for other platforms, most notably the Emmy-winning comedy “Hacks” for Max and the upcoming “Cape Fear” limited series starring Javier Bardem and Amy Adams for Apple, which Springborn called a “dream project.”

“We of course like working with our in-house platforms and have had multiple shows with them. But not every show is going to be right for them,” Springborn told TheWrap. “It is part of the studio ecosystem to sell everywhere, and we’re encouraged to keep doing that while servicing those internal platforms.”

“With ‘Hacks,’ [Max and Adult Swim comedy EVP] Suzanna Makkos raised her hand and said, ‘I have to have this show.’ It was just so apparent and evident that Max was the right home for it,” Underhill said. “At the end of the day, you want to go where it feels like the right place for a show to get the TLC it deserves.”

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