Power Creator Courtney A. Kemp Is Netflix-Bound

When Courtney A. Kemp created Power—about James "Ghost" St. Patrick’s dual life as a nightclub owner and drug dealer—a decade ago, her strategy was simple. “I was trying to make basically a Black Sopranos, with some Homicide: Life on the Street pieces, just cobbling it together from the things that I loved growing up,” she says of the hit series, which debuted on Starz in 2014 and ran for six seasons, drawing more than 10 million viewers a week at its peak. Little did Kemp know she had actually stumbled into her version of the Marvel or Star Wars universe: a franchise that has become the holy grail for networks in the Peak TV era. Power ended in February 2020, but Kemp, Adweek’s TV Creator of the Year, built that into a franchise that has spawned not one, not two, but three Power spinoffs, with a fourth in development. Power Book II: Ghost (following Ghost’s son, played by Michael Rainey Jr.), which Kemp created, debuted in September 2020 and returns for Season 2 in November; prequel Power Book III: Raising Kanan (focusing on the childhood of the Power character played by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) wrapped its first season in September and has been renewed for Season 2; and Power Book IV: Force (focusing on Power’s Tommy Egan played by Joseph Sikora) is coming next year. Kemp didn’t start to think of Power as a potential franchise until Starz urged her to make a seventh season of Power, the network’s most-watched show. There was just one problem: “I had run out of story,” says Kemp, who had already given Starz one more season than she had envisioned it running for. “I didn’t want to continue to make a bad show,” like other long-running series that run out of steam in their later seasons. She had another idea instead: “I got inspired by the Marvel Universe,” says Kemp, who says she once “fan-girled” when she met Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. “As someone who watched the X-Men cartoon as a kid, I just love the idea of creating the universe and how they did it, which was—and obviously I copied this—taking specific characters and looking at them in new ways.” The important thing when you build a franchise is to understand what your brand is.Courtney A. Kemp The new plan, with four spinoffs set to roll out sequentially, seemed ambitious but manageable until the pandemic shut down all film and TV production for several months last year. “It ended up that we were doing everything at once and then trying to shoot everything at once, which was very painful,” says Kemp, who found herself simultaneously running a writers room for Ghost Season 2, a separate writers room for an HBO show she was developing called Dirty Thirty and overseeing strategy for the three other Power spinoffs while also homeschooling her 9-year-old daughter. “I thought one show was stress; I had no idea,” says Kemp, who calls it, “without question, the hardest year of my life.” How did she juggle it all? “Poorly,” says Kemp, who leaned on her longtime showrunning philosophy, which is, “What is the thing only you can do? Everything else you can delegate. So I started to boil things down to what are the things that only I could do?” At the top of that list was constructing the entire franchise, and she incorporated a lesson she learned from her late father, Herbert Kemp Jr., an advertising pioneer who worked at agencies including J. Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather and UniWorld Group. “The important thing when you build a franchise is to understand what your brand is,” she says. “In the Power universe, that’s momentum versus emotion.” When creating episodes of Power, “every scene had to have a transfer of power in the scene. Someone comes in with it; someone leaves with it.” Now, Kemp, who cut her teeth writing for shows like The Bernie Mac Show and The Good Wife, is the one leaving with the power. In August, she signed a lucrative, exclusive deal with Netflix, which means she will step back from the Power universe (though she’ll still have some involvement, similar to fellow Netflix creator Shonda Rhimes’ ties to Grey’s Anatomy) to make new programs for the streaming behemoth. “Over the last year, I became a business person. I was running a company to create these franchises. I don’t want to do that. I’m a storyteller. I want to tell stories. So now I need to go somewhere where I can tell stories, as opposed to just being the guy keeping the trains running on time and making sure that this deal gets done in time for us to shoot,” says Kemp, noting that after a decade, “I feel that it’s hard for people to separate my voice as a writer from the Power universe, and I think it’s time to figure out what that looks like.” And while Netflix is indeed paying her handsomely to leave Starz and Lionsgate behind, “It’s not about the money,” she insists. “It’s really about, what opportunity will I have to grow as an artist?” Kemp’s Netflix deal covers multiple platforms in addition to TV, and, she says, “I’m excited to do all of it, whether it’s a podcast or a film." After years of making 10-episode Power seasons, “even just thinking of a different structure is interesting.” But what Kemp is most eager to tackle at her new home is “working in the area of real emotion.” When she was developing Power, Kemp says, she initially made the Ghost character an alcoholic, a trait that executives at the time told her to remove because it wasn’t “relatable.” But after the pandemic, and more recent shows that have more directly addressed grief, “I feel like we don’t have to play so safe anymore,” she says. “That’s something that’s really exciting to me: to be able to tell a story that’s really about me … of being unafraid to really express who I am through my art. And that is the Netflix opportunity that I’m excited about.” Check out the rest of the 2021 Hot List here.

Hot List

Courtney A. Kemp Turned Starz’s 'Power' Into a Hit Franchise—and Now She’s Netflix-Bound

After juggling 4 spinoffs, Adweek’s TV Creator of the Year is reclaiming her voice

Jason Lynch

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Jason Lynch