Trio of respected TV execs team up to join microseries boom as Hollywood’s legacy TV structure battles for survival

By the end of 2023, both Jana Winograde and Susan Rovner found themselves out of their respective top TV jobs — two more casualties of a Hollywood ecosystem that was rapidly collapsing into itself. 

Winograde is the former president of Showtime, while Rovner was chairman of entertainment content at NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, and before that had a two-decade tenure at Warner Bros., where she was president of Warner Bros. TV.

Three years later, the two longtime friends who first met at former NBC chairman Ted Harbert’s house years ago when both were at director-level positions at ABC, are betting their next career chapter on the microseries boom, alongside another Hollywood heavyweight, former ABC chairman Lloyd Braun. 

When the trio’s microseries platform, called aTwist, launches on Sept. 3 (which Page Six Hollywood can exclusively reveal), it’s both a gamble that Hollywood-style production can legitimize a growing, but chaotic, industry and an admission that Hollywood in 2026 has less room for those who have spent their careers shepherding hit TV shows.

(Braun famously came up with the ABC smash, “Lost,” while Winograde helped launch shows like “Dexter: New Blood” and 18 series developed by or under Rovner at WBTV hit 100 episodes.)

“We realized that any employment we would have, in the way that we always thought of ourselves as executives in these big companies, we would be managing decline,” Winograde tells Page Six Hollywood. “We’d both been in situations watching these companies just turn into something completely different.”

That’s when microseries came into the picture. “Somebody introduced us to microseries, and at the time, nobody had heard of them. We had never. They were really big in China. They were just coming into the United States, and it’s really bizarre,” Winograde continued. “The second we saw them, we knew that was the thing we wanted to do.”

Despite the growth and money flowing into short-form vertical video, the microseries space still operates with few guardrails. Multiple agents told us that aTwist, with its traditional television pedigree, was one of the platforms that made them most hopeful the burgeoning industry would be professionalized.

“We bring a lot of trust,” Rovner says. “It’s a lot of the wild, wild west right now.”

Rovner and Winograde have an in-house staff of salaried writers, who “are like executives for us,” the two say. The shrinking production amid the collapse of the so-called Peak TV era has led to fewer opportunities for up and coming talent. 

“It’s so much harder to break into the business in a traditional way,” Rovner says. “The vast majority of the people that we are hiring and working with are more of the up and comers, and more of people who are having a harder time breaking in.”

When it launches, aTwist will have a mix of soapy, horror and romance fare like “My Book Boyfriend Came To Life,” “Pretty Hurts And So Do I” and “Something Is Alive in My Attic.” Among their buzziest shows are Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Justin Mikita’s musical comedy “Theater Kids Vs. Zombies.” 

But aTwist is also bringing unscripted series, a genre that hasn’t been prevalent among microseries. Josh Silberman (whose credits include “Deadliest Catch,” “Fear Factor” and “America’s Culinary Cup,” which he produces with Rovner) was brought in to oversee unscripted, and the company hired Keshet’s Lisa Roos as president of creative and Alpine Labs’ Jamie Denenberg as head of production.

“Everyone’s talking about verticals,” Silberman tells us. “I think it’s a really interesting space. And I found that a lot of my friends and a lot of my peers are very curious about vertical and what vertical means.” To Silberman, the proliferation of microseries is just the next evolutionary step of television. 

“There’s always going to be a role for traditional television and streaming and theatrical features because they’re telling big epic stories that cost a lot of money,” Winograde says. “But with vertical integration and consolidation, there are just less opportunities to create great stories. But the need for those stories still exists.”