Susan Zirinsky Knows a Thing or Two About What Viewers Want

Susan Zirinsky has been toiling away in the trenches of CBS News for 50 years now, having started her network career in 1972 as a 20-year-old part-time clerk for the Washington bureau where, yes, she helped cover Watergate. In the 1980s, her relentless energy and experiences covering the Capitol were quite literally used by James L. Brooks as the template for Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News. In the 1990s, she began a 25-year run molding 48 Hours into the true-crime storytelling machine it remains. And now, following a 29-month stint overseeing all of the Eye network’s news division, Zirinsky has settled into her next act: helping satisfy the streaming industry’s insatiable appetite for documentary programming.

About a year ago, Zirinsky partnered with the Paramount Global–owned CBS to launch See It Now Studios with the mandate of developing documentaries, docuseries, and other nonfiction content for linear and digital platforms — but with an emphasis on streaming services, particularly those within the Paramount family. Paramount+ has already launched several projects from See It Now, including a missing-persons investigative series produced with Tyler Perry; a six-part docuseries about the rise of right-wing hate groups and their role in the January 6 insurrection attempt; and one-off documentaries about Ghislaine Maxwell and the wives of Russian oligarchs. And last week, the streamer premiered the most ambitious and cinematic See It Now production to date: 11 Minutes, which explores the stories of those who survived the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Festival mass shooting in Las Vegas. Buffering caught up with Zirinsky to discuss her thoughts on how the streaming boom is shaking up the longform-news business, whether we may have reached Peak Docuseries, and why she doesn’t think TV’s love of true crime will ever fade.

Buffering: So even though See It Now is producing for all kinds of platforms, streaming has been an early focus for the studio. As someone who spent most of her long career working in linear TV news, how does streaming change what you decide to produce and how you produce it? 

Susan Zirinsky: In streaming, things don’t happen overnight. You don’t green-light a project, unlike on the network, where two days later I could give you a full-fledged hour on subject X. These are much more involved. And you have to have an intuitive sensibility of what you think will resonate and how to break through the tsunami of material, what can attract people.

Is there anything about the audience for streaming that is different from linear, or anything about the platform that lets you explore stories in a different way than you could when you worked mostly for CBS? 

Absolutely. I think that, first of all, the time that’s available on [network TV] now is absolutely at a premium. We did a two-hour Watergate special for the network that was very well-received and a Holocaust special that was just recognized at the Venice Film Festival. So we do produce for linear. But streaming gives you this tableau of a longer storytelling ability, whether it be a single doc or a docuseries.

If you turn on any of the SVODs and you start watching an entertainment series, what happens? You binge. And why do you binge? You binge because you become attached to the people within that entertainment show. And that is something I have noticed in the production of docuseries. I find that if there are continuing characters, which there are, that I want to be with them and I want to see the evolution of the story. You want to take the journey with the story and you want to see how it ends, which is why the binge happens … Streaming allows you to develop characters that take you through a storyline.  It’s very satisfying.

Are budgets bigger for streaming versus what you’ve been used to in network TV? 

Well, it depends on the project. Some things are more. I have a deal with [Paramount+/Showtime exec] David Nevins, who wanted a director so he’s helping fund it through P+. And we’re doing a feature project about Afghanistan that will come out in 2023. I’m not going to say what it is because we haven’t really announced it yet, but it’s an extraordinary project.

I’ve heard some talk among TV critics and even some viewers that perhaps streamers have become too addicted to docuseries, that ideas that would probably be best explored in a two-hour documentary are being stretched in order to increase engagement numbers for platforms. What’s your take on the trend?

First of all, I think both Terry Wrong [See It Now senior executive producer] and I look at every project, whether it comes in as a single one-off doc or a multi-episodic series, and we have to see the evolution of a story. It is not uncommon for somebody to pitch us a four-, five-, or six-episode idea and we bring it back to three or four. It’s not unusual for us to have a three, and then feel like there’s so much more material, let’s do a fourth episode. But we also do single docs. We were approached by a British company to co-produce a project with them called The Secret Lives of Oligarch Wives. We looked at it, we discussed episodic — but it was absolutely a single film and that was the decision we made.

I think every [idea] comes in as an open-faced sandwich: It comes in with the ability to add extra layers and extra bread and make it a series, or we view it and we say, “This is going to be a much stronger, 90-minute single doc.� There is no formula; there is no rule. It has to editorially have value to be episodic and to be able to carry it. There is nothing worse than getting to two episodes and you think, “We should stop it here.� We have not had that problem. We feel that everything we have made multi-episodic felt like the right amount.

It is accurate, though, that platforms right now seem to really want docuseries more than docs, right?  

I think it’s fair to say that the majority are interested in episodic. But I have found in pitching to the outside SVODs and cable, they are still open to single-film ideas.

True crime is something that you were doing on 48 Hours before it was cool. What’s your assessment of the state of the genre now that it’s become so ubiquitous, especially in streaming? Is there too much of it now, or is there no such thing? 

I think true crime is rich, it is provocative, and it is not going away. It is not waning. I think that the genre is like mystery books. There is something to locking yourself into an amazing story and asking, “Where is justice, and is it achieved?� You lose yourself in the story. And it crosses every socioeconomic level, like with a Tinder Swindler or Bad Vegan.

In the true-crime space, See It Now has already done Never Seen Again with Tyler Perry for Paramount+. Anything else in the pipeline?

We’re working on developing something with a Texas Ranger who’s partially retired, and I’ll just give you the cut line because I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but he’s the serial-killer whisperer. And it’s dynamically fascinating to see the process and hear the techniques. It’s just a part of humanity, depraved sometimes, that’s fascinating.

Do you have to worry about competing for the same stories with your former colleagues at 48 Hours? 

So far, no one has come to us with a pitch that is in conflict. Oftentimes Judy [Tygard, executive producer of 48 Hours] calls and says, “We can’t take this on, are you interested in it?� And we will or won’t, based on the editorial…. I have called her on some stories that I thought were worth looking into. So 48 and See It Now Studios are a deeply collaborative group. Besides, I would never hurt my baby.

Let’s talk about 11 Minutes, the docuseries about the worst gun massacre in America, which happened five years ago this month at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. You don’t mention the name of the shooter in the project at all. 

That’s correct. We did not mention the name of the shooter and that was a conscious decision.

And the series also doesn’t go deep into his motives or the still-unsolved mystery of his motive. Even though the format of the docuseries allows you to cover a lot of ground, you went in another direction. Why is that?

Well, we really wanted to do the survivors’ story, and what happens to people after it’s over. The emphasis was really more, when a seismic event like this happens, what happens to the people, the victims, the first responders, the people — just regular people — going in to help other people? Good can’t trump evil, but this is a restorative piece about humanity. Didn’t care about race, politics, anything like that. This was about people in that darkest time helping each other.