A little over a decade ago, Mark Itkin sat in his plush WME offices and suggested he was no longer having fun. “And I don’t feel I can innovate the way I used to be able to in this job,” he said at the time. So after what was then a 34-year career — first at William Morris and later as a partner at WME — Itkin announced his retirement. The man who’d been an architect of both the modern syndication business and the unscripted TV model, bringing some of the industry’s most significant hits to air, including The Real World and Deal or No Deal, was done. At 62, he’d take some time off, and then he’d decide how to innovate again. In those first…
