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 few years, Itkin did what many in his position would do. He consulted, both for the conglomerates and for a handful of production companies looking for their exit. He joined a few boards, he traveled, he kept up his DJing habit and his classic car and modern art collections. He even tried to sell a memoir. “How I Made Reality Television Sexy” was his proposed title, but he says the market was still reeling from former agent Mike Ovitz’s book “not being a success”; plus, he was told that he didn’t have enough celebrity content to get it sold. (“Will I try it again? Perhaps.”) He stayed active in the unscripted space, too, getting a handful of unscripted shows off the ground, including College Bowl with Peyton Manning for NBC and America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation for Prime Video.
Over time, Itkin stepped further and further outside of his comfort zone, lining up projects across theater (he’s bringing the story of legendary songwriting and producing duo Gamble and Huff to stage), film (a Ronnie Spector biopic starring Zendaya and written by Barry Jenkins for A24) and scripted TV (a straight-to-series order for a Highway to Heaven reboot for Fox). A year or so ago, he added acting classes to his mix, too. Sure, Itkin had dabbled with plays when he was still in high school, but says he found himself dissuaded from pursuing it professionally … until now.
“I figured why not? I had the time,” he says over Zoom in early September. “I told my teachers upfront, like, ‘I don’t have to be doing this, so if you don’t see any talent here, people be honest with me.’ And they’ve been very encouraging.” He’s now looking for an agent to represent him and intends to start going out for commercial auditions shortly. (The photo at the top of this article is one of his new headshots.)
Whether or not his acting career takes off, Itkin is exceedingly glad he extracted himself from the agenting business when he did. “My timing was impeccable,” he says, as he laments a series of shifts in the agency business, including the demise of packaging (“I understand it, I don’t necessarily have to agree with it”) and the concentration of power at the top of these companies — to say nothing of the industrywide consolidation and the fact that the unscripted business has gotten pummeled in recent years.
“I think back to the early 2000s when you could sell tonnage,” he says, rattling off behemoths like Big Brother that he had a hand in. “And I got spoiled because you could be innovative and try new things and really take risks. Now, it’s the opposite. Everyone just keeps saying, ‘We want IP. We want IP.’” And as he acknowledges, that’s if they are willing to buy anything at all.
Not that it’s stopped Itkin from trying. In fact, he’s been busy mining the globe for potential formats, and is in various stages of development with a few. He says he’s got a music competition show cooking that he’s particularly excited about, largely because of the creative way it will engage the audience. Get Itkin going and it’s clear he’s similarly jazzed about all of the ways, from YouTube to TikTok, that you’re able to test and distribute content now — and the fact that if a traditional buyer isn’t interested, you can do it yourself in ways that you didn’t use to be able to.
“I see a lot of pessimism in the business, and my answer to that is then just figure out other ways to do it,” he adds. “I mean, we’ve all had to pivot for different reasons, and sometimes it takes a while and sometimes it fails, but that’s life. Things change. Turn lemons into lemonade.”
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