Paramount Global : Ashley Kaplan on Bringing Slime to the NFL

NB: Tell me a little bit about your career background. What was your first professional role and how has it led to your current role?

AK: I started as an assistant for Doug Ross, the president of Evolution, a reality television production company. From there, I got promoted into development and started to develop unscripted television. It was right around the time they began to use the word "vlog." It was the beginning of video on the internet, and I was very interested in that. That set the course for my career, which has always straddled a line between digital and traditional. After Evolution, I took a role at Current TV, which was a startup founded by former Vice President Al Gore.

I was working with different young people working with their content and putting it on TV as short-form, which led me to Logo at then-Viacom. Logo was great because it felt like a small startup inside of a much larger organization. I was a producer in the multiplatform team, shooting and editing videos.

NB: Can you talk about your day-to-day role at Nickelodeon and what you're focused on in video and digital?

AK: During Covid, my team and I were given the opportunity to create a Town Hall piece of content. The people on this team can do a bit of everything: they can write a script, they can produce, they can shoot, they can edit. We're all sort of little Swiss army knives.

We might've been the first people in the entertainment business to put out a piece of content that was remotely produced. We turned it around in two weeks or something. It was crazy. We produced a couple new series in the middle of lockdown in 2020, including Group Chat and Unfiltered.

At that point, Brian [Robbins] made the decision that the team could also handle the unscripted television business as well, which also leaned into my experience in reality and unscripted.