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Nick Weidenfeld

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Nick Weidenfeld

Nicholas Rabb Weidenfeld (born 1979 or 1980) is an American television producer and executive who led program development at Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and Fox's Animation Domination High-Def. He won producing Emmy Awards in 2012 and 2013 for the series Childrens Hospital. Since 2016, he has been the president of programming for television channel Viceland.

Biography

Weidenfeld was born in 1979 or 1980 to Edward Weidenfeld, a Washington DC lawyer, and Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, former press secretary to First Lady Betty Ford. He grew up in Georgetown and attended Georgetown Day School. While there, he parlayed his interest in rap into assignments writing up interviews for little-known popular culture magazines and websites.[1] He started the alternative magazine While You Were Sleeping in the late 1990s,[2] and reviewed music for magazines Seventeen and Teen Vogue. At Columbia University, he was a liberal arts major. He interned at the Pentagon.[1]

In 2004, he arranged to interview Mike Lazzo, a senior executive at Atlanta's Cartoon Network for an in-depth piece (intended for Esquire magazine, but never published) about the network's Adult Swim block of programming.[2][3] The two got along well.[1] Lazzo wasn't familiar with Weidenfeld's satirical While You Were Sleeping, but his staff was. Partly on the strength of that, Lazzo offered him a job as director of program development at Adult Swim.[2][3]

The position would entail shepherding projects from greenlighting to air.[3] Adult Swim was a small operation at the time.[2] Weidenfeld's first responsibility was to find talent, particularly developers outside the traditional animation pipelines, who could help the company grow beyond animation into live action.[4][5] In seven years there, Weidenfeld developed, among others, Robot Chicken, the Peabody Award-winning animated series The Boondocks, Delocated, and Childrens Hospital.[1][5][6] For Childrens Hospital he would win producing Emmy Awards in 2012 and 2013.[7]

In June 2008, he married Amantha Starr Walden, a music executive at Adult Swim and daughter of the late record label executive Phil Walden.[8] By October 2011, when their son was born, they had moved from Atlanta to Los Angeles.[9]

In February 2012, then Fox President, Kevin Reilly tapped Weidenfeld to lead the network's foray into late-night Saturday animation.[10] Dubbed Animation Domination High-Def (ADHD), the 90-minute programming block would be filled with 15-minute shows broken up by shorter bits.[4][10] Fox built a 12,500-square-foot, 120-person, animation studio, ADHD Studios, with Weidenfeld at its head, and he founded his own production company, Friends Night, to license content to the network.[1][10] Aiming for comedy that would appeal to an audience younger than himself, he tried to hire only young candidates who had never paid to watch television.[2][4]

ADHD premiered in July 2013.[4] Fox took the underperforming experiment off the air in June 2014 because it failed to reach the target audience and upset too many of the network's older viewers.[11] Two ADHD series were moved to primetime, while others continued on digital platforms,[12] before they shifted to a new late-night animation block on sister channel FX in 2015.[13]

Weidenfeld was hired in April 2016 as the president of programming for Viceland, a youth-oriented television channel that is a joint venture between A&E Networks and Vice Media.[14]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Heath, Thomas (June 16, 2013). "Value Added: Washington establishment scion aims to conquer TV with cartoons". The Washington Post.
  2. ^ a b c d e "Five Experts Explain How They Discover the Best of New Art, Film, Literature, Comedy and Design". The Fader. May 7, 2012.
  3. ^ a b c Strike, Joe (December 28, 2005). "Development Execs: Who They Are and How They Got There". Animation World Network.
  4. ^ a b c d Caramanica, Jon (July 5, 2013). "Fox's Experiment in Animated Living". The New York Times.
  5. ^ a b Owen, Rob (March 6, 2014). "'Axe Cop' a gleefully bizarre addition to Fox's 'Animation Domination High-Def'". Standard-Examiner. Ogden, Utah.
  6. ^ Berkowitz, Joe (June 27, 2012). "Cartoons 3.0: Adult Swim Vet Nick Weidenfeld On Bringing Late Night Animation to Fox". Fast Company.
  7. ^ "Nick Weidenfeld". Television Academy.
  8. ^ "Weddings: Amantha Walden, Nicholas Weidenfeld". The New York Times. June 8, 2008.
  9. ^ "Insiders: Births". Variety. November 7, 2011.
  10. ^ a b c Spangler, Todd (May 3, 2013). "Fox Sets Toons to Warped Speed with ADHD". Variety.
  11. ^ Malone, Michael (April 17, 2014). "Exclusive: Fox Scrapping Animation Domination HD Saturday Block". Broadcasting & Cable.
  12. ^ O'Connell, Michael (April 17, 2014). "Fox Plans Animation Domination HD for Primetime in 2015, Nixes Late Night". The Hollywood Reporter.
  13. ^ Miller, Liz Shannon (February 19, 2015). "How To Create an Animated Comedy Empire, According to the Creator of Fox's ADHD". Indie Wire.
  14. ^ Rose, Lacey (April 22, 2016). "Viceland Hires Two TV Veterans in Top Positions". The Hollywood Reporter.
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