![]() My desire, of course, is to make sure that there’s a narrative that can be seen through the whole show. The shows themselves are 27 minutes long, but we have three hours of material and a lot of great backstage stuff so we want to make sure that you can experience all of those things on different platforms as well as the show itself. It’s brand new and it’s a network that is dedicated to the arts in a way that Bravo used to be and also has a very big digital footprint. We originally wanted to do something mostly digital. As we were in the process of pitching this show and thinking about where it would fit, David came across Ovation, which to be frank, I had never heard of before, but which is in 50 million households. We wanted to maintain the hip factor of the show. I mean - standing room only popular. So many people outside of Los Angeles kept asking how they could watch it that we decided, let’s begin filming this and pitch it as an actual television show. ![]() We thought it would be a fun thing that our friends would come to, and it turned out to be enormously popular. First Wednesday of every month, we would have a writer of some note that we would interview along with a live band, and we charged 20 bucks a head. My producer, David Andreone, and I are fans of ‘Inside the Actors Studio,’ but we always thought, how cool would it be if you could do that show but with writers and in a nightclub with a live band and everybody was drunk? So we began by first doing it as a live show at the DBA in West Hollywood. How did you come up with the idea for the talk show? The first episode features legendary producer Norman Lear - who was so at ease during the conversation, he even stopped to take a call from his daughter. Reza Aslan is an accomplished religious scholar and author, who’s lent his professional insights as a producer to HBO’s “ The Leftovers” as well as ABC’s upcoming biblical drama “ Of Kings and Prophets.” Now he’s also taking a turn in front of the camera for a new talk show, “Rough Draft with Reza Aslan” for Ovation, interviewing famous writers about their work - along with a liberal dose of alcohol.
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