There’s a memorable scene in Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” documentary about her headlining performance at Coachella in 2018, when she asks a production crew member for a 30-foot-wide camera track. He tells her it doesn’t exist. She then proves him wrong.
The Emmy-winning television producer Jesse Collins remembers that moment well, so when the pop superstar called on him to produce her Christmas Day N.F.L. halftime extravaganza “Beyoncé Bowl” for Netflix, he was ready to meet her demands.
“Hell no, I will never tell her something doesn’t exist unless it really doesn’t exist,” he said recently with a laugh, “because she’ll Google it and she keeps up with technology. If it can’t happen, I am 1,000 percent certain it can’t happen.”
Collins, 54, has worked closely with Beyoncé on awards show performances, including her raucous rendition of “Freedom” at the 2016 BET Awards, when she danced and kicked in a shallow pool of water.
“The water was one of the most complicated things that I’ve ever done on any award show,” Collins recalled in a video interview from his office in Burbank, Calif., in a comfy black hoodie as the sun beamed behind him. “Most people try to get away from water,” he said, but an executive had promised it. “When you start the conversation with, ‘This was promised to Beyoncé,’ everybody’s like, ‘We’re going to make this happen.’”
Making things happen is Collins’s specialty, and it’s why heavyweights like Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z have recruited him for their projects.
Collins has worked on the last five Super Bowl halftime shows and will be an executive producer at the 2026 spectacle, too. He’s been part of the Grammys since 2005 and has credits on the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the American Music Awards and “Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular,” along with the Emmy Awards, where he’s frequently nominated, sometimes against himself. In 2023 Jesse Collins Entertainment became the first all-Black production team to helm the Emmys, and they’ll return this year for a third time.
But his longest-running client is the BET Awards, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary on Monday with special honors for Mariah Carey, Jamie Foxx, Snoop Dogg and Kirk Franklin. Past shows have produced many pop culture memories, including Whitney Houston’s hilarious speech at the inaugural event in 2001, Rick James’s final performance in 2004, and the show three days after Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 that became all-star tribute to him.
In 2003, Jackson had surprised James Brown on the show’s stage by presenting him with a lifetime achievement award. “That’s what this BET Awards is — it’s unpredictable moments,” Collins said. “The culture sat down as a family and watched it come together.”
Collins, who grew up in the Washington metropolitan area, said he always knew he wanted to work in entertainment. After high school, he interned at radio and TV stations before landing on-air gigs in Maryland, D.C. and then Los Angeles, where he hosted a radio show with Eazy-E. He soon entered the television world, writing on the ’90s sitcom “The Parent ’Hood.” Later he produced a TV special celebrating the 20th anniversary of BET in 2000, which led to the network developing the awards show.
Collins was hired as head writer — “when I say head writer, I mean a head writer of one, it was just me” — but asked for a producer title when he realized he was doing the work. “If you don’t ask in the beginning, at least put it out there. What do you have to lose?” Collins said, flashing both the confidence and boy-next-door energy that have made him a confidant for many A-list artists.
Collins continued to produce for BET, including “Black Girls Rock!” and “Real Husbands of Hollywood,” but he leveled up in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic when the BET Awards emerged as the first big awards show to take place while the world quarantined. The production highlighted social justice messaging and included well-executed, artsy, pretaped performances.
The show caught the attention of the chief executive of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company, Desiree Perez, and Collins started working on the Super Bowl halftime shows a year after it began handling the event, making him its first Black executive producer.
Oprah Winfrey was also impressed and brought Collins on board to do a CBS special about the civil rights icon John Lewis. She recommended him for the 2021 Academy Awards, and he got the job, becoming the show’s fourth Black producer in 93 telecasts.
Winfrey said in a video interview that she had a moment in her early dealings with Collins that reminded her of meeting the poet Maya Angelou when she was a young television reporter. She had interviewed Ms. Angelou for five minutes, when the poet, apparently taken with Winfrey, suddenly said, “Who are you, girl?”
When she began working with Collins, Winfrey said, “I thought, “Who are you, sir?’ I was so impressed with his professionalism and creativity and artistry, because not only is he an artist, he also knows how to execute.”
Winfrey, who shared an Emmy nomination with Collins for “The Light We Carry: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey,” said it was important for her to shine a light on another Black executive in an industry dominated by white people.
“Listen, I’ve been in these super high spaces for quite some time, and you never see a Black producer in control of everything,” she said. “My only other experience had been with Ava DuVernay. So yes, it was me appreciating his work and then wanting to spread the word to everybody I knew who could be influential in helping him get other work.”
Another big Collins fan? Cardi B. The rapper worked closely with him during her performances at the Grammys and BET Awards, as well as Netflix’s hip-hop competition show “Rhythm + Flow” and the Facebook series “Cardi Tries.”
“I feel safe with him when it comes to a TV show, or especially when I come to an award show, because let me tell you something: Sometimes the award shows will try to set you up and try to do something funny. They will bring drama,” Cardi B said in a phone interview. “Jesse Collins, he will never do that. He will never trick the artist. He will never put an artist in an uncomfortable situation. He wants you to feel like you are working with people that you trust, almost like a family.”
Collins said “credibility with your word” is what makes a great producer. “If something goes wrong, nobody knows me — they’re just going to look at the artist,” he said, so it’s imperative to deliver or to make it clear when you can’t.
But having anonymity and privacy is something Collins enjoys about working behind the scenes. “Sometimes I can walk around the Super Bowl halftime show and if my credential’s backwards, I’m getting stopped. And it is what it is,” he said. “Do you want to be Bernie Taupin or Elton John? Both have had amazing lives.” But he’d choose Taupin’s.
Collins won an Emmy for best variety show (live) alongside Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar and others for the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, when hip-hop artists took center stage there for the first time. He reunited with Lamar for this year’s Super Bowl show and said he was impressed with the rapper’s creative plan for the performance, which touched on politics as well as personal issues.
“You could tell that they studied all the prior halftime shows. I mean, all of them,” Collins said, “and found a way — which is really hard — to do something that had never been done before.”
“The first day of rehearsals, I was like, ‘This is going to be the most memed social media event ever,’” he added. “All the Easter eggs throughout the message, the music, the wardrobe — it’s all so connected, much like his music. Years later you’re catching things that maybe you didn’t catch the first 52 listens.”
Upcoming projects for Collins and his team of 22 full-time employees include a film about the blues legend Robert Johnson and a biopic about Queen Latifah: “The things that she’s willing to talk about in this movie are things that people just don’t know, and it’ll be incredibly inspiring once it hits the screen.”
He’s also been busy with a remake of the classic talent show “Star Search” for Netflix. Like much of his recent work, Collins was personally recruited for the project. “Taraji P. Henson was meeting with the original producers and they said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And she said, ‘Star Search.’ And they said, ‘Who do you want to do it with?’ And she said, ‘Us.’ So here we go.”
Collins’s past work with Henson includes the BET Awards, which she has hosted several times. Reflecting on the event’s 25 years, he recalled watching one of music’s most celebrated songwriters, Babyface, edit a speech introducing Whitney Houston that he had written for him.
“I was like, ‘Oh [expletive], Babyface is hitting a lot of deletes,” Collins said, laughing. When the musician got stuck on the last line, Collins made a basic suggestion, “and he was like, ‘That works.’”
Collins laughed again at the memory. “I was like, ‘I rewrote Babyface today, and I saved this whole thing,’” he said. “This is great.”
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