Wheelhouse Entertainment’s Courtney White on How Streaming Has Changed Unscripted TV

When Courtney White started working at HGTV in 2005, the standard episode order for a new series was no less than 65 episodes.

Today, as the president of Wheelhouse Entertainment, White is tasked with juggling a busy portfolio of unscripted series for broadcast, cable and streaming platforms. As White explains on the latest episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business,” the days of getting double-digit episode orders for even the most successful series are long past.

“The reality, which is a harsh one for the business, is there are very few really high-volume shows anymore,” White says. “So it really is about the six- or eight-episode order. That that is the norm.”

White details the structure of Wheelhouse Entertainment, part of Brent Montgomery’s Wheelhouse group, where she oversees seven busy production labels that are experts in specific genres and sub-genres of production. It allows Wheelhouse to make the most of each title that flows through the company. A TV series is no longer just a series but a concept that can be built out as a documentary, a podcast, a digital extension, merchandise and e-commerce and more. Among Wheelhouse’s latest offerings are the Netflix series “Million Dollar Secret” and Hulu’s “Got to Get Out.”

“We think of ourselves as the Avengers. We’ve got specialists in all of those sub genres, and they share resources. Our digital teams support all of those labels,” White says. “Those digital teams are really charged with building out the content from a vertical standpoint, but then we also have things like our legal and our production management team that is centralized. The idea is that the labels all are
are quite specific and they’re scrappy and really development focused. And when they get series up and running, they plug into our centralized machine. And our centralized machine is also quite scrappy, because we find every project is bespoke and needs a specialty team.”

White spent 17 years as a top programming executive for Food Network and HGTV. She joined the Wheelhouse group in 2022 when she stepped down as president of Food Network in advance of the merger that created Warner Bros. Discovery.

White also explains why Wheelhouse has invested significant resources to host networking events — dubbed “Ladies Who Launch” — for creatives in New York, L.A. and other cities. In a world where most pitches now take place on Zoom, Wheelhouse wants to create that environment of spontaneous chit-chat that sometimes leads to huge breakthroughs.

“When you now pitch an idea on Zoom, it’s a very controlled half hour pitch. You pitch the idea, then you click off. And what executives and producers say a lot is that , the real business didn’t get done in that pitch. It used to be that time when you’d walk to the elevator. That’s when something unplanned happened,” she says. “So many shows were birthed that way, and so this is about bringing people together who might not otherwise intermingle, and it’s about the magic of collaboration.”

“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.