Over the last two decades, drama series produced by Twentieth Century Fox Television have been famous for their innovative storytelling techniques and high-quality production values, from L.A. Law, Ally McBeal and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The X-Files, NYPD Blue, and more recently 24 and Prison Break. Gary Newman, the company’s copresident, explains why Fox’s dramas are so successful.

WS: How do you keep a show like 24 fresh season after season?

NEWMAN: Oh boy! If we knew the formula, we’d probably bottle it and sell it or guard it carefully! I think that the key creative team of Joel Surnow, Bob Cochran, Howard Gordon and Evan Katz deserve an enormous amount of credit for finding ways to continue to top themselves with twists and turns each season. At the core, we have a star who has incredible charisma and is magnetic, and people just love Kiefer in this role. Even though the audience knows that at the end he’s going to succeed, they just love the ride. And I guess that if the show has done anything particularly well that has caused it to stand out, and keep people feeling that it’s fresh, it’s that literally each season there are four or five surprises that you just don’t see on network television: from Nina being the mole in season one, to Jack shooting his boss, to the twist at the end of last season with the Chinese government. It’s those sorts of surprises that just when you think they’re going to save the day, they don’t save the day-in one season nerve gas [was actually released]. In other shows they manage to save the day before the unthinkable happens.

WS: As the show become more successful and moves on to more seasons, inevitably its costs go up. How does Fox deal with the escalating cost of dramas?

NEWMAN: It’s a real challenge. We look at our dramas a little bit like a portfolio. It’s okay to have a show like 24 that costs a lot of money because it’s also generating a great deal of revenue. On first-year series when you’re not sure whether or not you are going to have something that’s successful, I think you tend to be a little bit more disciplined and a little tougher on the costs. We’d like to think that most years we’ll come up with at least one or two dramas that we can produce a little bit less expensively than the others, although we have not had quite as much success with that recently! But it’s a big challenge and, fortunately, the more successful dramas [find a place] either in syndication or home video or international sales, which allows us to absorb the costs and still make an appropriate profit on the shows.

WS: Does Fox give writers a good amount of creative freedom?

NEWMAN: Yes. We really believe in the theory that most of these shows start with a great idea from a writer and we don’t really believe in giving writers assignments. The shows need to come from their gut and be about something that they really understand and are so passionate about that they can dig deep enough to get to the essence of the relationships and the essence of the stories. We think this is a key ingredient to making shows resonate for an audience. So there’s nothing that makes us happier than when a pitch starts off “I base this pitch on my family,” or “I base this pitch on my first job,” or some such thing. We find these always seem to have much deeper emotional cores, and we’re fans of that.

WS: What elements have contributed to the success of Prison Break or The Unit?

NEWMAN: Well, they’re very different shows. Prison Break is an adrenaline-washed, serialized story where the characters are constantly in jeopardy and seem to be up against impossible odds. But at its heart, it’s a very, very relatable story. A brother trying to save his falsely accused brother-people understand that and emotionally connect with it.

The Unit is quite a different show. It is brilliantly cast. Dennis Haysbert seems to be imbued with that heroic nature that his character on The Unit has. Similar, in a way, to the David Palmer role he had in 24. The audience loves to see him succeed and they feel tremendous confidence that someone like him is protecting the country. The Unit is a very unusual show in that it has interesting military action stories every week, but at the same time it has very honest, emotional stories going on back on the base, generally with the wives, frequently with the colonel or one of the other men in the unit, and I think that honesty is part of why this show is resonating with audiences.

WS: How closely do you work with the international sales division?

NEWMAN: When we are developing shows we have one of our drama executives pitch our ideas to [the international sales people]. And if they come across an idea they feel would not work internationally, we take steps to change it or consider not doing it. We really do need these shows to work to justify the expense of producing them.