#David Nevins’ Next Act: CEO of Peter Chernin’s North Road Company

After six months on the sidelines, David Nevins has found his next act.

The former Showtime boss will become CEO of North Road Company, Peter Chernin’s global content studio that houses his Chernin Entertainment (Ford v. Ferrari) as well as the U.S. assets of Red Arrow Studios and Words + Pictures. The independent outfit, which formally launched a year ago this month, includes unscripted content from Kinetic Content (Love Is Blind), Left Right Productions (The Circus) and 44 Blue (Wahlburgers), along with an international division focused on global acquisitions and co-productions.

To hear Chernin tell it, Nevins personifies “quality,” which is what he and the company are after. In his new role, Nevins is expected to oversee North Road’s expanding portfolio, working closely with the leaders of each of its units, while Chernin continues in his role as the company’s executive chairman. It’s not yet clear how involved Nevins will be in the creative operations on a day-to-day basis. “We have really powerful people running their own businesses and I’m going to help where I can, thinking through big picture business decisions and also acquisitions,” says Nevins, who intends to spend a decent amount of time oversees as part of what he calls the “acquisition hunting” process.

In an exit interview late last year, Nevins said he hadn’t ruled out another corporate gig, though given the seismic shifts in the entertainment industry, he was actively exploring more entrepreneurial paths. During his half-year stretch between jobs, he reportedly made a more than $3 billion offer to buy Showtime, with the backing of private equity firm General Atlantic. He was ultimately rebuffed by his former company, which decided to fold Showtime into Paramount+ instead. And though Nevins declines to discuss his failed bid, he does acknowledge that the exercise gave him “a taste for what’s possible in the capital markets and what’s possible for the well-funded.”

North Road certainly fits into the latter category, with Chernin noting that the company has “several hundred million dollars in the bank, which makes [it] a great financial partner.” In fact, to bolster its capital reserves, North Road, which secured up to $500 million from Providence Equity Partners and $300 million in debt financing from Apollo at launch, took in an additional $150 million from Qatar Investment Authority in January. By May, it had acquired a stake in Peyton Manning’s sports production venture, Omaha Productions. The following month, North Road purchased the Turkish film and TV company, Karga Seven Pictures.

And though Nevins acknowledges it’s “without a doubt, a weird time” to be starting, given that the industry is in the throes of a major work stoppage, Chernin is unfazed. As he sees it, the strike will end, be it this month or later this year, and the market is ripe for an entity like theirs. “The business is an enormous state of flux, and these big companies, possibly with the exception of Netflix, are under enormous pressure right now — creative pressure and financial pressure — and I think that there has never been a better time for a really high-quality, trusted, well-financed company,” Chernin says. “I think it’s a great time to be looking at other things to buy to help us build, just like we did with Karga Seven, and it’s also a great time to build organically. I also believe that we’re in as good a position to navigate the disruptive changes in the business as anybody. God knows I’ve seen a lot over the years and I think David’s seen a lot, too.”

Until very recently, Nevins had spent a dozen years on the legacy media buyer side, at what is now Paramount Global. After both a merger and a series of reorgs, he ultimately became chairman and CEO of Paramount Premium Group and the chief creative officer of Paramount+ Scripted Series (save for the vast collection from Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan), an admittedly nebulous and unwieldy title. And though he had plenty of success during his tenure, with a programming track record that includes hits Homeland, Ray Donovan and Billions, among others, and a number of promotions, he admitted upon leaving that his autonomy had been reduced in recent years and he “never really had [greenlight] power at Paramount+.”

Nevertheless, Chernin suggests that Nevins brings with him a formidable resume and a thick rolodex to the new venture, to say nothing of his reputation for producing programming efficiently – particularly at a time when rivals were spending enormous sums. “No one likes to write about it or give you credit for being responsible. In fact, everybody writes about the opposite, which is ‘This thing costs $30 million an episode or whatever,’ but one of the things that David deserves a lot of credit for is that he was always really focused on budgets,” says Chernin, reiterating a case that Nevins had made for himself back in December. He does so again now, adding: “I’ve always been really efficient as a producer and I also know what it’s like to sit in those buying chairs with those budget pressures, and you got to make your bets work, so I think we’ll be very responsible and attractive to the platforms.”

Nevins first rose to prominence as a programming exec at NBC back in the 1990s, when he’d been part of the team that developed juggernauts including ER and The West Wing. He left for a brief stint at Fox, where he first crossed professional paths with Chernin, before moving over to run television at Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment. It was at the latter where Nevins worked on projects like 24, Friday Night Lights and Arrested Development. Now, at North Road, he’s back on the seller side, where he’ll oversee a business with more than 85 active productions, including Netflix’s Rez Ball, a feature about a Native American basketball team from Reservation Dogs’ Sterlin Harjo, the Jamie Foxx/Cameron Dian film Back in Action and Apple TV+’s upcoming historical miniseries, Chief of War, created by and starring Jason Momoa. He says he’s eager to dive in.

“The way I look at it is that there are a lot of challenges and a lot of pain everywhere in the business right now but there’s not really a demand problem. The audience is hungry, people want new shows and new movies,” says Nevins. “And so we’re going to have to figure out how to deliver them in ways that are a bit more efficient and in ways that get artists paid for success. One of the things I’m really looking forward to at North Road is helping to figure out that model in a way that works for the artists, for the suppliers and for the platforms.”