How HBO Max Head of Originals Sarah Aubrey Is Using Her New ‘Marching Orders’ to Dive Deeper Into Fan-Favorite Warner Bros. Discovery IP

Sarah Aubrey definitely did not sign up for this. 

In early 2015, when she ended her producing partnership with filmmaker Peter Berg to join what was then Time Warner, she came in to help lead TNT, which fielded just a handful of original series a few nights a week. 

Today, as Aubrey looks around the company that is now Warner Bros. Discovery, TNT is a shadow of its former self. Every division head and most of the top managers across the company have been changed out — in some cases more than once — within the past four years. And her job has morphed from developing a dozen or so original scripted series per year to being the head of original content at HBO Max, now with an international purview, serving as a key lieutenant for HBO and HBO Max content chairman and CEO Casey Bloys and WB Discovery CEO David Zaslav in the global streaming wars.

“We’re in a frisky environment, and I certainly am keeping my knees bent,” says Aubrey, who has never lost the Southern lilt of her native Austin, Texas.

As 2023 approaches, she has endured as one of the last senior executives standing at the company among the team that launched the HBO Max platform in May 2020. In addition to changes at the top, Aubrey, over the past few months, has had to handle a slew of HBO Max cancellations amid post-merger belt-tightening. She’s also ushering in a new dawn for the DC Universe through HBO Max series such as “Peacemaker” and “The Penguin.”

“She handles things with an even temperament,” says Imagine Entertainment co-founder Brian Grazer, who worked with Aubrey as a producer on the “Friday Night Lights” TV series that ran for five seasons, from 2006 to 2011. “She doesn’t get panicked. You don’t have to manage her in any way. She is a self-sustaining, independent individual, and she is great with collaborators. A big factor as to why ‘Friday Night Lights’ was so good and so respected and accomplished was in large part because of Sarah. She was there on every little shoot.”

Despite the turmoil that has enveloped her corporate surroundings, Aubrey has done her job. She’s shepherded a number of stylish successes (“Hacks,” “The Flight Attendant,” “The Sex Lives of College Girls”) that have helped HBO Max stand out in the sea of streaming content. She figured out how to produce titles during a global pandemic, and now she has to figure out how to produce more shows on a tight budget as WB Discovery faces the reality of a slow-growth environment for streaming. That means saying no, at times, to über-producers like J.J. Abrams and Greg Berlanti, who are accustomed to hearing “yes.”

In August, HBO Max scrapped Berlanti’s DC series “Strange Adventures,” and in September it took a pass on a few projects from Abrams’ Bad Robot banner, which has a very rich production deal with Warner Bros. The move was read by the industry as a sign of penny-pinching and a trimming of its original-series ambitions.

Aubrey knows that’s the chatter but begs to differ. “Development comes together and doesn’t come together all the time,” she says. “That’s actually a very normal part of our jobs. I think to draw a circle around one or two shows and make an overall judgment is a little inaccurate.” 

But HBO Max also surprised the creative community last summer when it removed 37 low-performing series from its menu in order to save money on royalties owed the creative community and profit participants. As evidenced by WB Discovery’s third-quarter results, the company is reevaluating the strategies and vision for its future that were put in place just a few years ago by the AT&T regime. Now, under Zaslav’s leadership, Aubrey and Bloys are among the few survivors who are still tasked with turning the battleship again.

“I feel very good about my North Star and my marching orders,” she says. “I’m planning and building ahead. We have an incredibly healthy content spend, and I have a lot of work to do. So that’s where my head is. And my team’s head is very much on ‘OK, here’s our new base level, and we’re moving forward.’”

Aubrey’s background is as a producer and a development executive, but she’s proven to be agile when it comes to  adapting to the ever-changing business dynamics in television. “We look at different metrics for success: How many people — how many new viewers — did a show bring in? How many total viewers watched a series? And did it reduce churn? Then what is the retention value?” Aubrey says. “We don’t live in a world of Nielsen anymore; raw viewership data is no longer the mark of success of a streaming service. Show performance means different things inside different businesses, and that, too, is just not an equal playing field.”

With Netflix releasing a weekly Top 10 chart of its own self-measured most-popular titles based on hours watched, and Nielsen posting a weekly ranking of streaming programs across measured platforms by minutes watched, Aubrey is correct in that the numbers that are being bandied about right now don’t exactly make for an apples-to-apples comparison for the industry.

Her purview in the new Zaslav-run era is tripling down on Warner Bros. Discovery’s IP-driven tentpole series, like the upcoming “Dune: The Sisterhood,” “The Penguin,” “Green Lantern,” and “Dead Boy Detectives”; the second season of the “Sex and the City” sequel, “And Just Like That …”; and in-development projects like “Welcome to Derry,” a prequel TV series to the “It” movies.

Aubrey is matter-of-fact about the distinction between the creative lanes that HBO takes versus its younger HBO Max sibling. HBO is all about the new; her mandate at HBO Max is to make more out of all the assets that are already under the Warner Bros. Discovery roof. “HBO is very much looking outward into the community for new IP, new pitches, new takes on things,” she says. “We focus much more inside the company on existing IP and work closely with the big filmmakers inside our company.”

In that capacity, Aubrey has the opportunity to collaborate with executives across Warner Bros. and HBO, including Bloys’ team, Warner Bros. Pictures Group co-chairs Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca, and Warner Bros. TV chairman Channing Dungey. If Discovery’s big foray into the heart of Hollywood — film and TV production on a lot steeped in showbiz history — is to succeed, it’s on this team to make it happen.

Aubrey ticks off her wish list of WB-affiliated content that she’d like to craft for her platform: “Peacemaker” and the sequels to “It” and  “Dune.” “Those are all very much homegrown initiatives and require a lot of coordination across the company,” she says.

Coordination is only increasing these days, as filmmaker James Gunn and producer and film executive Peter Safran take over as the heads of DC Studios — another big piece of the sweeping management changes put in place by Zaslav. “It’s a brilliant move to bring a filmmaker and producer into these executive roles for DC,” Aubrey says. “I know from working with James and Peter on ‘Peacemaker’ that they have the creative passion, confidence and deep filmmaking expertise to chart a new course for DC that’s full of originality and exciting for both fans and filmmakers.”

Aubrey’s experience developing DC projects in the first two years of HBO Max has been “really fun and very collaborative,” something she expects to continue under Gunn and Safran’s reign. “There’s not this territorialism around characters or stories. And we very much talk about things in both directions: ‘That would make a better feature,’ or ‘That character should start in a feature and then come into a series.’ Frankly, I imagine that will continue because it’s a big operation.”

“Working with Sarah Aubrey was and is truly the most perfect experience with a TV executive we could possibly imagine,” Safran and Gunn say in a joint statement. “Always supportive, always wise and strong and convincing when she needs to be.”

With decades under her belt of studying what viewers want, Aubrey maintains her drive to follow not just what regulars enjoy but what new generations of fans are looking for. To that end, she has taken to checking an unexpected source to assess the impact of her shows: TikTok. Without traditional ratings to measure reaction to shows like “Peacemaker,” “The Staircase” and “And Just Like That …,” social media has become a substitute for her ratings fix.

“It kind of cracks me up to go onto TikTok and see how strongly people feel,” Aubrey says with an exuberant laugh.

With the “It” prequel series (which Aubrey says is full of “demented scares”) in the works; the “very joyful” second season of “And Just Like That …” in production (and focusing on Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw finally being “up for the next adventure or the next love”); and conversations about the future of WB IP like “Harry Potter” (“We’re very much in the business of creating new content for those fans and thinking what to do next”), there’s a lot to keep her busy when she’s not scrolling TikTok.

“I have a real optimism and excitement about what this team can do together with all of this iconic IP,” Aubrey says.