Mattel TV Development Exec Phil Breman Says What Matters Is a ‘True Emotional Connection’

Phil Breman, the head of live-action series development for Mattel, knows the primal power of a good toy.

Breman, a veteran of Disney, where he oversaw live-action scripted programming, and NBCUniversal, where he handled all creative and production elements on shows like “Kenan” and “Timeless”, is helping adapt Mattel properties like “Monster High” and “Hot Wheels” for new audiences. This could mean turning “Monster High” into a live-action series or turning “Hot Wheels” into “Hot Wheels: Ultimate Challenge,” a show where winners will see their car turned into an actual Hot Wheels collectible.

“Audiences want to be engaged,” he told The Wrap for this week’s Office With a View. “They want to have true emotional connection. That’s what’s going to keep someone watching from week to week.”

Perhaps the most exciting project Breman has in the works is “Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge,” coming to HGTV on July 16, which loosely ties into the upcoming “Barbie” movie. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav recently touted the show as an example of the synergistic might of the newly combined company, pairing a show on a Discovery channel with a Warner Bros. studio production. TheWrap spoke to Breman for this week’s Office With a View about what he’s learned through his career, the imaginative power of toys and why nothing really matters without that deep emotional connection.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned throughout your career?
Nothing is ever as bad as it seems. And what I mean by that is when you look back, what seems like a crisis in the moment is something where it was usually a simple fix that made it better.

A concept will only get you so far. It’s the characters that matter. Emotional connection is what matters. It can be the town that you’re in, it can be the people that you’re watching, it can be the relationships that you’re seeing, it can be a contestant on a show. It’s getting invested in the people. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what the wrapping is, that’s what’s going to really matter.

What career advice would you give somebody trying to break into the business now?
Establish your network. Meet people. Take the time out to just sit down with people, whether it’s a Zoom, a coffee, a lunch or breakfast, whatever it might be. Take the time to meet people and foster relationships. Don’t be shy about reaching out to people on LinkedIn.

Everyone’s favorite subject ultimately is themselves. And if you’re giving someone else an opportunity to talk about themselves and how they got into the business and what they did, you’re seeing it through their eyes, you’re understanding a different track. And you might learn about a job that you didn’t even know existed. Before I got here, I can’t say that I knew how TV worked. When I was younger, I moved up wanting to be a writer, not even knowing about this whole executive track and how that worked.

Then continue to foster those relationships throughout your career. Be nice to everybody. You never know how fast people are going to rise, where they’re going to end up and how they can help you or how you can help them. Always offer to help people if they ask and always just reach out to people that you don’t know.

Looking at your career and the different roles that you played, it’s striking how you have been able to go in so many different directions. How important is that elasticity when working in the industry?
I think especially now you have to be flexible, you have to be willing to learn new things and get uncomfortable. I don’t remember which Nascar driver said this, but I love it because it’s such a great piece of advice: He said, “If I’m not scared out of my mind, I’m not going fast enough.” And that discomfort is that means you’re learning. And so the ability to pivot is getting comfortable with discomfort and just being able to learn new ways, new things.

Every show that I’ve ever been a part of, or worked on or written on or whatever, it’s like being a part of a different business. It’s different people, it’s a different tone, it’s a different approach. And you have to learn, “Oh, that’s the way they do things. Okay, I need to be flexible in how I do it.” If you’re a rigid person and one plus one always equals two, this is going to be a challenging place for you. But if you understand that the industry as a whole is evolving all the time, it’s changing every day, there’s so many different opportunities that you can be looking at.

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How did you end up at Mattel and what got you excited about the company?
What I was craving, having come off a very long period in current programming at NBC, was that experience of building something. I used to express to my wife all the time. When I got here, the pitch was the potential of that library of IP we have access to.

Some of our IP has established worlds — if you think of American Girl or Monster High, they have great characters that you can build on and you can even expand those worlds.

But then there’s other IP where you get to be really creative, like what does the Magic 8-Ball look like as a series? All these things that you can start to play with in your mind, whether it’s scripted or unscripted. I think that that was the thing that got me most excited — the potential not just to develop the IP, but to be able to think outside the box.

Toys are famously difficult to turn into TV shows or movies. Why do you think that is and what dictates your approach?
It’s an evolving process, to be totally honest with you. I can’t speak to any of those movies as to why one succeeded over another, I can only speak to it as a viewer. Was I emotionally invested in it? Did I care about the characters? Sometimes the IP will draw you in, but it’s the characters that will make you stay.

To have that touchpoint to your childhood again through this whole new experience is something that is really, really cool. And so it just depends on what the execution of that experience is.

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What can you tell us about “Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge”?
This is part of the summer of Barbie. It’s a four-episode series, a lead-in to the “Barbie” movie but a whole separate experience. This is essentially a competition show, where we turn a regular house into a life-sized Barbie Dreamhouse.

And what’s great about this is we do this with HGTV and Mission Control, with a cavalcade of HGTV stars. And we pair off our designers every week, so there are two sets of two. They’re each assigned an area of the house and we pit them against each other to see who did the Barbie Dreamhouse version of, say, the kitchen versus the living room and the backyard versus the bedroom. We have a lot of fun with each area of the house.

It’s all part of our lead-up to the to the biggest piece of the of the summer of Barbie, which is the “Barbie” movie. It’s just another way of giving back to fans have this emotional connection to the Barbie Dreamhouse.

Have you ever come across a piece of Mattel IP that you couldn’t figure out how to adapt?
That’s the fun, you know — you look at it and you’re like, “How do you do this? How is this more than just a toy?”

And that, that essentially is the job. It’s to look at things, some of which have a whole world attached to them and a deep library of characters, and some don’t. Then it’s incumbent upon us to get creative on how we do it. That’s where my writer brain, my development brain, my producer brain all come together.

I have a great executive, Chynna Weiss, who is my partner in crime on the live-action side, and she and I have so much fun just bouncing around ideas. We’re our own little writers’ room sometimes. We’re always just trying to think through, “What is our approach here? How would we tackle this?” And we get to put on our thinking caps here.

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