Meet Joe Lewis

Got rules? It might be time to rethink them.

Joe Lewis, head of comedy at Amazon Studios, is out to challenge everything you've heard about how to succeed in television programming. Let's get his take on a few precepts popular among TV execs.

Avoid risk. “We're looking for shows that are very serialized, and very risky. There needs to be a good reason not to make a show, or we're probably not interested.

We ask, ‘Is this show provocative, and what's the best reason not to make it?’”

For example, Lewis says, “Politics is very divisive.” (Alpha House is about four Republican senators who share a rental house in D.C.) “Transparent is extremely progressive.” (It centers on a father of three grown kids and his transition from male to female.) “Most people either don't know much about classical music or think it's boring.” (Mozart in the Jungle goes behind the scenes at the fictional New York Symphony.)

Copy what's already working. “We won't do anything that's been done before. We hear great ideas for shows about marriage and dating, but there are already a lot of great shows about marriage and dating. Someone would have to find a way in that is fundamentally different from anything we have ever seen. We're looking for worlds people haven't seen before.”

Obsess over your competition. “I don't think about what other people are doing. We focus on making this a great home for people to take risks and do things that are creatively forward-thinking.”

Buy repeatedly from the same tried-and-true suppliers. “We have an open submission policy. All you have to do, 24/7, is go to Amazon.com and upload your scripts.”

In fact, two pilots, Gortimer Gibbon's Life on Normal Street and Salem Rogers, came to Amazon from newcomers discovered via online submissions. Gortimer will be in its second season this year.

Most Amazon shows are developed with talent that's established (including Ridley Scott, Shawn Ryan and Carlton Cuse), but not necessarily in TV. Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau created Alpha House, and filmmakers Woody Allen and Whit Stillman will be making their first TV series for the service.

Of course, Amazon is not an ad-supported broadcast network, but a streaming service supported by an online retail giant. As such, under its unique business model, original series need only draw new customers to Amazon Prime. That's a subscription service (currently $99 a year) that offers free two-day shipping for online purchases, along with access to streaming movies, TV and music

“The goal is to grow the Prime ecosystem and make it a better and better deal for our customers,” Lewis says.

It's fitting, then, that Lewis is used to thinking unconventionally.

When he interviewed with Amazon Studios head Roy Price, he'd already left behind several years of network and studio experience (at Comedy Central and Fox) to launch his own streaming service, Bark, in 2010.

“The idea was to create a network out of nothing, to release original series in a way that hadn't been done before,” he says of the start-up. He got by without a salary for two years while raising capital. But with the recession still blunting investor confidence, "The environment in Silicon Valley wasn't super-friendly to content."

Bark never went live, but Lewis learned "a lot about the TV business and venture capital, and what future product could look like."

He was still trying to make a go of it when he heard Amazon was looking to start something similar. He met with Price and became the first hire at Amazon's fledgling television division in March 2013.

Growing up in suburban Potomac, Maryland, Lewis was obsessed with TV comedy — he liked The Kids in the Hall, SNL reruns and Comedy Central. So obsessed, that when he was in third grade, his father bet him $500 that he couldn't last a year without television. Lewis won that bet.

"I'm good at impossible goals," he says. At 13, he attended a TV and film summer camp at Northwestern University, and at 17 he enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California.

As a young exec at Comedy Central, Lewis started the film division and helped develop Tosh 2.0, a series built around comedian Daniel Tosh's take on viral videos.

At Fox, Lewis admits, his mindset was out of sync with the prevailing culture, and his position as director of production was short-lived. But his first visit to Amazon's Seattle headquarters convinced him he'd found a home.

"My personality works well with the Amazon mentality, which is about thinking big, making decisions quickly, and looking toward disruption."