Jason Winer Expands TV Production Company, Taps Renate Radford To Run It

NBC development executive Renate Radford has joined director-producer Jason Winer‘s Small Dog Picture Co. Starting on Monday, she will oversee development for the company, which is based at 20th Century Fox TV with an overall deal. “Jason is the premiere single camera comedy director working in this business right now, and we are all excited about building the ‘Jason Winer brand,’” 20th TV chairman Dana Walden said. “We’ve worked with Renate for years when she was an executive at NBC and she is the perfect person to help Jason grow his company. Getting her as his head of development was a coup.” For the past 7 years, Radford worked as VP comedy development at NBC and previously was development executive at Universal TV (then NBC Uni TV Studios) and  its pre-Universal merger predecessor, NBC Studios.

Winer had taken his time finding an executive for his company. “It was a matter of fining the right fit, and I feel we hit a homerun with Renate,” he said. “What makes her such a perfect head of development is that she has worked on the buying and the selling side, which is rare, she has forged relationships with people in town and has survived several regimes at NBC as she is so highly thought of. The amazing thing is she is very plugged into the comedy world.” Winer had known Radford socially, and then the two got to work together on the NBC comedy series 1600 Penn last year. Radford was on the development team for the series, which was co-created/exec produced and directed by Winer.

In terms of his plans for Small Dog, Winer said he’d been doing research and “I feel one of the mistakes some new pods are making is trying to do too much too fast. We want to be very selective and work with people we are very passionate about, set up only handful of projects that are highly packaged, frequently with talent attached. And I want to direct as much as possible.” Winer, repped by ICM Partners and Mosaic, is directing the second and third episode of 20th TV’s upcoming Robin Williams-starring CBS comedy series The Crazy Ones after directing the pilot. Also on the To-Do list for Small Dog is expanding into drama programming, an area Winer has not tackled yet but is eager to do.