EXCLUSIVE: Jax Media, an Imagine Entertainment company, is shutting down its development operations. I hear the announcement was made during a staff meeting yesterday. Moving forward, all development will be consolidated and run through Imagine Television. Jax’s development team will wind down by year’s end when its executives, led by Jax Head of TV Dave Binegar, who joined a year ago, and UK Creative Director Katie Gahamire, who came on board in April, will depart.
The move signals Jax reverting to its original core business as a production services company. That will continue under new head of production Yolanda T. Cochran who was just hired for the role, replacing Jake Fuller who stepped down to focus on independent production, mostly sports-related.
Also staying on are Hussain Case-Ahmed, who joined in April and runs production in the UK, as well as John Nemeth and Morgan Howard, who oversee production in New York.
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Jax Media, co-founded by Tony Hernandez and Lilly Burns, was launched in 2011 and quickly made its mark for finding creative ways to efficiently produce high-end content, especially comedy, handling physical production for shows such as Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, Difficult People, Search Party, Younger, the Roseanne and reboot The Conners, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, A Black Lady Sketch Show, Russian Doll, South Side and Desus & Mero. Efficient, budget-friendly production has remained the company’s calling card.
Imagine initially acquired 51% of Jax Media in 2018, acquiring the remainder of the company at the end of 2023 when Hernandez and Burns exited their roles as Imagine Entertainment Presidents.
In the past four years, Jax’s production portfolio has slimmed down amid overall industry contraction but remains healthy with several ongoing series, Netflix’s Emily In Paris, Fox’s Animal Control, Channel 4’s Everyone Else Burns, as well as ABC’s The Conners, which is headed to an abbreviated final season, and Riz Ahmed’s upcoming series for Amazon, along with recurring Netflix talkshow franchise, David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, which last month delivered Jax Media’s 14th Primetime Emmy win.
Jax has always been a production services company with development capabilities. Over the past few years, there had been an expansion into development, which has proven challenging in a saturated — and contracting — marketplace, with no major greenlights. Like all media companies, which are examining closely their bottom lines, looking to save costs by streamline their operations, Imagine is doing the same by consolidating development functions.
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