After a strong first season—but with some lukewarm cultural response—we shifted the strategy toward something we could actually own: authenticity. In a 2023 landscape full of prestige crime thrillers with double (or triple) our spend, we couldn’t win by trying to out-flex anyone on “quality” alone.

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So alongside PR and Corporate Communications, I built a 360 approach that put the people and the process front and center—our DEI work, our talent, and the writers’ room. The real work was already happening; our job was to make it visible in a way that felt earned: spotlighting cultural consultants, elevating fellowship programs started by talent, and championing the idea of 'stories about us, by us'.

After Season Two landed culturally (and earned real press momentum), we made a deliberate choice: widen the audience. Dark Winds is intimate, prestige TV—but the levers we actually controlled at scale (linear, distributors, podcast, print) naturally over-indexed to a different viewer than the critics-and-awards crowd.

 

So we adjusted the positioning on purpose. Instead of selling it only as “a great mystery,” we built a back-to-basics creative approach designed for steady, dependable audiences—procedural lovers, broadcast drama loyalists, the nightly-news crowd—without betraying what makes the show special.

 

That shift moved the needle: Dark Winds became AMC’s most-watched series in 2023, and then doubled Season Two viewership with a Top 5 run on Netflix.

Each season of Dark Winds shifts genre—which meant my job was essentially to sell a “new show” to an audience that still wanted the comfort of consistency: clear stakes (good vs. evil) and an authentic cultural point of view they could trust.

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Season Three took the biggest swing yet: it moved into horror-thriller territory—no longer noir. That’s a tougher pitch on paper, but it opened a smart door. We could naturally overlap with darker-leaning viewers already living in The Walking Dead… and with the audience on our best-in-class horror SVOD, Shudder. With intentional cross-promotion built for horror fans, we kept our core owned audience excited while expanding reach into adjacent genre communities.

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And honestly—who’s saying no to a cameo of Robert Redford and George R. R. Martin playing chess?