Dave Noll, Emmy-Winning TV Show Creator & Producer

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Hello, friends. And welcome back to unlocking your world of creativity. This is the podcast where we go around the world, talking to creative experts about how they get inspired for new ideas, how they organize their ideas, and most of all, how they get the confidence and connections to get their work up and out into the world. And look, I've promised you to talk to people that actually do this. They don't just talk about the theory of creativity, but they're out in the stadium, in the arena, in the conference room, getting creative going. And so today's guest just in reviewing last year's count 70 plus new shows conceived and created pitched a hundred plus chosen in meetings, wrote 40 plus show decks. And just that all adds up to a career of over 3,300 episodes of television programming. And so if you want to talk to somebody who's really done the job and knows it's today's guest Dave Noll, Dave, welcome to the show.

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Oh my gosh. Thank you very much. And very, very nice to meet you, mark. Thank you.

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Well, great to talk to you and folks if you know this theme song right now, insert theme song in editor, then your know our guests, even though you don't know maybe the name or the face yet, you know, this show chopped Dave was just so great to talk to you about this and other creative ventures and TV.

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I love that show. It is my favorite show.

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Well, it's, it's got a whole different kind of drama and it sucked me into food TV as a regular, you know, kind of activity, you know, can only do so much law and order until you have to go over to the food network and get a taste of chopped.

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When we first were talking about chopped, the showrunner and the other creator and everyone who was working on, I kind of laugh because I was the biggest fan in that I, you know, and this is just what I do. I was pitching the whole thing I was saying. And I said this to the food network. I'm not sure in the first meeting, but definitely within the second meeting or the third meeting, I was saying, look, this could be your jeopardy. This could be on every night of the week and be the perfect show to lead into all of your other hits. And they laugh. They, you know, they politely laughed at me and I said, in success there, this really could be chopped junior chopped all-stars chopped champions. Or we could branch out to chopped grill masters to chopped UK and all of shockingly.

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This is the one time that all of those things actually have happened. It's unbelievable. But yeah, from the start, I was a huge fan of, this is a, it's a show with a very simple, simple premise. There's four chefs. They each cook an appetizer. The judges judge one of them is chopped. Now you're down to three chefs. They each cook a main course. One of them is chopped. Now you're going to, to, to cook a dessert. And I kept saying, it's like a law and order where you could do thousands of episodes. At that point, food network was very female set, very tilted towards the female audience. And as it turned out chopped is the unique show. I think it's because it seems almost like a sporting event. We take it very seriously. There's four competitors and, you know, and then three judges and a host, and those four competitors really are the top athletes in their field.

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They are the best in the business. And so I, I consider it like a sporting event where if you like the NBA, or if you like the NFL, you could watch an episode of Chopped. And at the end, there's a winner. Somebody wins, three people go home one by one and they lose, and the winter to take some $10,000 and you could watch five or six of those in a row, just like on Sunday you could watch, you know, two, three NFL games in a row. And all of, as I say, all of that has come true. Chopped is basically a 50 50 show. Men love it, just like women. Kids love it. The kids get it. They get that what's in that basket. They have to cook with. And whole families watched together. As I say that it has been a huge surprise because it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And now almost everyone's heard of it. It's just, it's astonishing.

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Yeah. And the parodies and the take-offs and the, you know, sales, meeting events, you know, all parties, birthday parties. I wouldn’t have a chopped birthday party.

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It's a very, it's a true story. My daughter Sophia. So I have three daughters. My middle daughter went once to a birthday party. She was like, I don't know, seven years old maybe. And when Sophia was that age, she was very precocious. Just, a smiling sunshiny, wicked smart kid. And she still is. And she went to the birthday party and my wife went to pick her up and it's just you know, she knew the kid, but we didn't know the family very well. And it happened to be a chopped birthday party. The funny part is my wife showed up and the mom said very in an accusatory way, she said so Jen, it was a, it was a chopped party. And look, I just want you to know, Sophia told everybody that her dad created the show and Jen was like, oh, he did. And the woman, apparently I wasn't there like, like she was crazy, like, like why of the billion people for our chopped to a birthday party, like the lady her brain broke. And my wife was like, yeah, he created it with his friend Mike? And they pitched it to the food network. And, and so the woman's mind was completely blown, but she thought I would have thought the same thing she thought Sophia was lying.

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Yes, Exactly. Well, and the pulse and the creativity continued. Now you have a top-rated show on the game show network which I've never called GSN, but as a branding guy, I think I need to embrace that more. Cause it's it's GSN. But tell us about this show.

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America says on the game show network again, like every, I like to say that every hit show is a miracle. There's no hit show on television where you're like, oh, that story is simple. And it makes sense. Every single one with chopped the development took two years, we had to do two different pilots. With America says we had pitched the show in a totally different way. At one, it was originally called billionaire. And it was win a piece of the billionaire lifestyle and we sold it to the USA network. They wanted these big giant changes and it became America says, and we worked extremely hard on it. And the development there were, just so many TV as a rollercoaster and there are so many Hills and valleys in that story. And then eventually right around the holidays in 2017 USA called they had loved the pilot and they passed and we were just absolutely devastated.

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But right around that time game show network was looking for game shows and we thought, well, maybe we'll maybe we'll sell it there. We went in on January 25th, 2018 with clips from that pilot, but in the boardroom, I played the game with the game show network executives. I literally played John Michael Higgins and said, we asked America and all of the things that we do on the show. And they bought 65 episodes of the show the next day and said it needs to premiere in June. So we're premiere to June 7th in 17, my birthday month season two. So just in the last, what has it been two and a half, three years we've produced now all well by the, by, in a couple of weeks, we'll have produced 450 episodes. So it is not the biggest show in the history of the network yet, but it's almost the biggest show in the history of that network.

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It's amazing. But that story has been again, a rollercoaster and you just have to believe in the creative believe in the game, play in both cases or believe in the show, if it's a different type of show and no matter what, just keep going and keep a smile on your face and keep enjoying every single day. Creativity and positivity TV especially is so filled with drama and trauma. And over the top you know, it used to be that everyone in TV thought they were Harvey Weinstein. So you could imagine how bad that was. At least now it's not that bad, but it's filled with all these ups and downs. And no matter what, you have to keep a smile on your face and, and focus on creativity and positivity every day, creativity and positivity.

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Yeah. That's a good theme. Well, and thinking about these pitches, you know, as you were describing, I got to play the game literally in the boardroom. You know, a lot of listeners of this podcast have done their fair share of pitches. I know I lived pitches for many years, but just the talk about drama, just the scripting, and the acting and the creativity and positivity of a pitch. How do you approach these pitches, Dave?

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We've been doing it a long time. I consider there's a point where I realized life's a pitch, right? Life's a pitch. And then you die.

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It's my new bumper sticker.

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Exactly. And it really is right. Like right now, we're in the process of getting my, daughter Sophia into college, that's a series of pitches. My daughter, Sarah just got her first job, getting a job is a series of pitches, getting a raise, getting the promotion, getting a girlfriend, getting a wife. That life is a series of pitches. And to me like, that's just what I believe. And you have to embrace it. I think, no matter who you are, you're going to be pitching at some point and you really do just have to embrace that. That's what life is and that's okay. And there's some things about pitching that no matter what you're pitching, whether it's a new ad campaign or you're an architect and you're pitching a new building or you're trying to get a date or whatever it is, there's some truths to pitching.

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One is you should probably remain positive no matter what happens, it's going help you. And people like confidence. They want to buy from someone that is a confident person. So if you mope into a pitch and I don't care what that pitch is the odds are against you. Then you should be happy. You should look, all right, don't look like a mess in a pitch. You know, like I've had pitches where I'm just like, I can't believe you left the house. Looking like that, let alone went on a pitch, looking like that. But then also simplicity. People really do love simplicity. They, don't want more con confusion in their life. More things that are crazy. They want a simple, simple message. And so when we're pitching we do as much research. We do probably more research than anybody.

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We try to research everything about the network, everything about the history of the network, what they're looking for, what's done well, what hasn't done well we look through all of our past notes, and then we're pitching them. What we think is the show that's going to solve all their problems. You know, it's not lost on us, how valuable chopped is to the food network and now to discovery, in general, they've made an outrageous amount of money on that show. Game show network has made an outrageous amount of money on America, says not to take away what each of those places brought to the, to the property itself. Obviously the food network and the game show network they built a giant structure by which we could then launch chopped or by which we could launch games or networks. So you have to be really nice.

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And that's another thing we do is we make sure the people we're talking to really understand that we appreciate where they're coming from as well. And we appreciate the time they're giving us. I mean, we've had, you know, probably 15, 16 pitches just in the last two weeks. And in the last two weeks, every time we want to make sure, you know, your time is valuable. Thank you so much. For spending time with us. And then hopefully in every pitch, you bring one cool, awesome thing that they can remember, and they can walk down the hall and say, oh, Cleve and Dave came in Cleve, the woman I work with and we create shows together, Cleve and, Dave came in and they pitched me this and look at that. And you can, you know, when you're on an elevator with somebody, you can be like, Hey, we got a pitch from Cleve and, Dave, let me tell you this. It's gotta be real simple, brighten their day and brighten their eyes,

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Exactly. I like that. Well, let's, let's turn the tables literally and think about the people on the other side of the desk for a second. And I'll connect the dots under the heading a small world. And my previous episode, I just interviewed an actor named Eugene Chow. And she's about to play a role in a film. And her role is an ambitious film producer getting pitches from TV producers. I said, well, yeah, I said, okay, here's convergence, what should I ask Dave? And so she said, look, I would really like to know about the other side of the desk. Is there an evaluation sort of criteria or is it all gut feel, you know, do you just sort of know it when you feel it or, Hey, here's my 10 point checklist of the show I'm looking for.

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I believe that all of it at the end of the day is the gut feeling, right? So whatever pitch one is taking on, I started off at MTV and VH1. So I know that side Cleave started off at oxygen shoe. So we both know the other side. And we were both at each place for about seven years. So we were there a while. Every buyer has and they call it different things. Some will say we have buckets that we're looking for, or they'll say we have pillars that were, you know, here's the pillars we're looking for. Or some will just say we have some bullet points or here's our target viewer. People used to say our golden viewer, all these different words that they say, so there is, and as I say, we do all that research, right? We know exactly what they're looking for, what hasn't done.

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Well, what has done well, all that stuff? But then at the end of the day, right, they're going to go with their gut. And that gut feeling is that that aha moment chopped, no one had ever done multiple competitions before in an hour. It was all, any, any cooking competition. We were just watching one over the course. So it, it was a big deal for us to go in and say it's, this is kind of like iron chef cause iron chef existed. And we loved it. But then at that point, there was this dating show called a limited date. And so we were able to say, it's kind of like iron chef meets a limited and you can imagine definitely no one had ever said that before. Cause eliminate, by the way, was it trashy syndicated a dating show where they all were there?

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What a frightening metaphor to connect.

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100 percent. But once that's such an aha moment, right? It's so brain-busting and then you're able to back it up that gives you all these questions. And then you're able to back that up. America says we really wanted to add comedy right into the heart of a game. So not like there's answers and then our hosts leaning on the host and he's going to be really funny. But what we noticed about the run-throughs for America says is that when I was hosting the run-throughs and we did a number of run-throughs and I was the John Michael Higgins, I was the host. I'm not a comedian and I am not funny. You know, I'm not compared to these types compared to Steve Harvey. I'm not funny at all. And I was getting big laughs just literally from raising an eyebrow or positing or tilting my head and like during the renters, Cleve was like this game.

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This is an amazing game because she's like, you're not funny. And yet you're getting gigantic laughs. And it was literally, we realized putting a clock on people and giving them the first letter of an answer. What happens is your brain goes crazy. And when you have to answer, you say, inevitably something ridiculous and those ridiculous answers, or sometimes naughty or sometimes dirt, whatever it is, but those answers make for great, great television viewing. So it's a game that's awesome that anyone can play. And no matter what the test audiences are, everyone's always yelling out the answers, you know, from their couch. But it's also a game where you naturally laugh. And that was the big aha moment for, for America says we're always looking in every pitch that we do. We're looking for. What is that? Aha moment, that one, and you can really only be one.

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You're not going to get away with two, because again, they have to go down. It's a game of telephone. They have to go down the hall and pitch their boss. The boss then has to go pitch the marketing department or the sales team or the graphics team or whoever they're pitching. Everyone has to get behind this concept. So it can only be one thing and it has to be something pretty great for them to say, Hey, we're going to give you millions and millions of dollars to produce this television show. And that's one thing you can't ever forget your yes, you'll take a development deal or a pilot, but really at the end of the day, you're asking them for tens of millions of dollars. So you can make hundreds of episodes. So it better be fricking amazing.

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Yeah. That's so interesting. You say that too, to again, get in the buyer's mindset because as you were talking about every, every part of life has a pitch, but you think of the other creative people who might be listening to our interview here, thinking I need to pitch my song. I need to pitch my play. I need to pitch, you know, whatever my creative art might be. You're describing this memorable takeaway that it's not enough to have a pretty voice. It's not enough to have a great idea. You know, everybody's got a nice voice in an idea, right? But, but this kind of, what are you in a nutshell? And so they can take it to the other office down the elevator and down the hall.

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My favorite interviews are always songwriters because when they talk about what they do and the level of difficulty, and I'm talking about your run-of-the-mill songwriters, right? The people that you don't even know, the people that are behind the scenes that are trying every day to sell their song to Kelly Clarkson or Taylor Swift or whoever it is. And they're like, what about my song? What about my song? What about my song? And when they talk about it, I'm like, that's it. That's what Cleve, because think about what they’re trying to do, is create one song. Could you just one song that can last for generations? And, and that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to create one show. That's it. One little format twist, something that can last for generations. I talk a lot about Merv Griffin because Merv created.

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So here's a guy who, if, you know, if, if you're younger than myself and you're listening to this podcast, you might not know who Merv is, but he was a talk show host. He was like before Oprah or, or Phil Donahue before her, there was this guy, Merv Griffin who had a daytime entertainment talk show. And one day he was on an airplane and he created jeopardy with his wife. He just did. And then one day he because him and his sister loved playing hangman. He created flipping wheel of fortune. Merv has not been with us for a while, but he's created two shows that my kids still watch.

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Yeah, that’s staying in power.

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And that's what great songwriters trying to do. And that's what Cleve and I are trying to do every day. So, and when songwriters talk about, you know, some, they'll say sometimes it's a hook, just one little musical hook that is, is an earworm that they can't get out of their head. Then they put it to words. And then when it, when they, when they add the words to that hook, some artists falls in love with it. And then they put out that song and then, everyone falls in love with that same hook. And I'm like, that's exactly what we're trying to do. What is that game show, hook that talk show, hook, that competition hook something like house hunters. What is that hook that people will be watching for generations? And everyone can fall in love with not just, you know, women, 18 to 24 men, 25 to 58 or whatever. What's that hook that everybody from an eight-year-old to a 98-year-old, what's the hook that everyone can enjoy. That's oh my gosh. That's like, what gets me up every single day.

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Oh, it's so exciting. And what do you think the nature of the genre is Dave? I mean, you're, you've just ticked off from a, you know, American idol, the voice song land, you know, all the way to chopped and iron chef and all points in between the competition show, you know, let's do it or leave it, you know, for you know, all of these shows have this competitive edge to it. And so oftentimes we say reality shown. We just think going back to your MTV days, but I mean, you know, this is not just a camera following people around there is an engagement of friction, a competition to it, but a well as you take the 50,000-foot view of the industry, what do you think the state of the genre is going forward?

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Well, what's great about what we do is that it's always been around and it all in some version it's always been around, always will be. And I point almost all of our success to a meeting each other but then B for about four years, we worked for Barry Diller, who is a billionaire. He started the Fox network. So all of those early Fox shows, you know, there used to just be ABC, NBC, CBS, and then Barry Diller. And his teams started Fox with married, with children, and the Simpsons. And then Beverly Hills nine, a 2.0 and Melrose place and all those things. That's all, that's how smart Barry Diller's. And now he's a multi multi-billionaire who runs IAC, which is a series of enormous digital companies. The guy is insanely intelligent. And what I say, which is absolutely true is in my entire career, the 20 smartest things I've ever, ever heard 18 of them were things that Barry Diller told me.

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That's how crazy smart this guy is. So at one point at that, at that juncture, at one point in 2009 or maybe beginning of 2010 Cleve and, I were just creating any type of show, any, any type of unscripted television show. And he in his very direct sometimes profanity-filled way. Let's say said to us, look, you guys be, you know, you're being just insanely stupid in that you can do a lot of these things, but you, you have one very unique talent that is so valuable that you don't, and you clearly are so stupid that you don't understand how valuable it is. And he was like, you can create the next survivor, the next American idol, the next house hunters you to have that. And that is by far the biggest money-making ability in the genre of television, unless you're a Dick Wolf, right.

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And creating a format for drama or unless you know, you're one of the great sitcom writers who, again, can, that's again, a formula that they plugged different characters and they can make, but he was like in the unscripted world, you guys have this amazing, unique ability you could create the next wheel of fortune or family feud or survivor stopped doing anything else stop doing don't don't do anything else. And it did come to the point where we met with all these different people on his team, the money people, international people, he sent us on many trips overseas. And we sold shows in Japan and Spain and Germany and Scandinavia and all this other stuff. But eventually, we came down to don't talk to me, don't pitch any show, nothing, unless you see a clear, obvious, concise path to at least a hundred million dollars, not $10 million or 12 million, a hundred.

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That's what your starting point is. That's the shows to talk to me, Barry Diller about, and you know, that breaks your bread. And you're like, oh my gosh, she's obviously right. And so that's what Clive and I have been attempting to do. You know, when we talk to people, we're like, look, our goal is a forever format. People talk about formats and television law. And order is a format that today shows a format wheel of fortune, all these things that are repeatable again and again, and again, what we talk about is what we want to create are forever formats, literally formats that can be around forever, that can make your property. And so you're thinking, why don't you have seven Netflix shows? I don't know the answer. It doesn't make any sense. See, it's crazy. Why aren't you there? It's ridiculous Disney plus Disney plus the other, you know, a couple of phone calls ago was like, we don't have any like ongoing hits shows and I'm like, well, you haven't bought one of them. Right,

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Right now, you know my number.

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Yeah. We're on the phone. Buy three things. Thank me later.

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Well, Dave before I close first of all, how do people connect with you and follow your work?

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Mostly LinkedIn, please connect with me on LinkedIn. 2021, as I say is all about creativity and positivity, but it's also all about sharing everything. I know, that's my goal. So I'm literally posting a couple of times a week, just here's how to pitch here's, you know, the pitfalls of television, and here's how we saved it. Here's how to stay energetic and excited every day. Even though, you know, we're getting turned down 99 times out of a hundred all of those things are on LinkedIn.

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These are good lessons to learn. And Dave, I guess I want to ask about collaboration, your partner, Cleve Keller, and you, you formed this team. You formed this company. Tell us about working with a creative collaborator.

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It's The best interview I ever heard about it was with Paul McCartney and he was talking about him and, and John Lennon and how they just never knew where the next hit was going to come from. And how sometimes it's just a couple of chords you play, or sometimes it's a lyric or sometimes John comes in and is just humming a tune. Or sometimes John comes in with a couple of words and then, and that is how the two of us work every single day. There's so many things there's, you know, there's endless amounts of lawyers and agents and all the business money, all that stuff that you have to deal with. But what we try to make sure to do every single day is exercise those creative muscles. And we really do believe that creativity is a muscle just like lifting a weight or just like, you know, if you're playing golf, you have to get that swing down.

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Creativity is exactly the same. You have to do it every single day until you hit on that magical thing. So we're constantly talking. I mean, we probably talk about 10 new ideas a week or, or our polishing sunlight every single day. When we don't do it, I kind of get sad. Like, and I, and I'm just like, why am I in such a bad mood? And it's like, oh, I haven't really created with Cleve in a couple of days. I need to do that. But we're texting each other. Oh my gosh, did you see this? Oh my gosh, what about this? What about this? Did you see this article? Did you hear this song? Did you read this? Did you see this constantly back and forth?

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Because you never know where that inspiration might come from.

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A hundred percent.

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Yeah. And on days you might be low she's high vice versa, whatever the case is, right? Yeah. So

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Helpful. And the television's so crazy filled with so many, like legitimate, crazy people that you're, you're like, if you weren't on the phone with me, I would not believe what I actually heard happened. Or if you weren't on that zoom, I wouldn't believe that I was part of it. So you are so happy that you're able to bounce and you're like, that was crazy, right? We can't possibly that doesn't make any sense. You can't listen to that person. You're so happy that you're, you're able to bounce something off of not only creatively, but business-wise off of someone that you trust. And you've worked with, for, we sold our first show in 2003 and it aired in 2004. So it's been a long time. Whatever the number of years is .

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It's a great history. Well, we're definitely going to connect with you on LinkedIn and follow your work. And we'll all be looking for the next episode of whatever that next big show is. I hope you'll let us know when you sign that down. Ii.

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Its gonna be huge, its gonna be amazing, its gonna be bigger.

New Speaker (: 32:35

I see that other forever show coming. Well, folks, my guest has been Dave Noah, what a great conversation. And if you didn't take away, before this theme of creativity and positivity, I just want to put an exclamation mark at the end of this conversation, because I've really felt both Dave and I can't thank you enough for the time.

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Thank you, mark so much. It's been an honor. Thank you.

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Yeah. And listeners come back again next time because our around the world journey is going to continue. Look just in the last few episodes. We've talked to folks from San Antonio in San Francisco Bangkok, Thailand, Johannesburg. We've gone from New York to LA all points.

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to the glorious state of New Jersey where we are now.

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And where we are in the golden state.

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It's so good. That’s right. So come back again. Next time. We'll continue to talk to these creative experts and practitioners about how they get inspired, how they organize their ideas, and how they get the connections and the confidence to pitch those ideas and get them up and out into the world. So until next time, I'm Mark Stinson and we've been unlocking your world of creativity and we'll see you next time.