Steve Barry is the show runner for NBC’s Small Fortune, which airs on Monday nights at 10. Barry says he developed his chops to be a showrunner by being a local TV news writer/producer at stations in Atlanta, Miami and Fort Myers, Fla.
Steve Barry is the showrunner for NBC’s Small Fortune, which airs Monday nights at 10. The show premiered on May 31. Barry says he developed his showrunner chops by being a local TV news writer/producer at stations in Atlanta, Miami and Fort Myers, Fla.
I hired Barry as a marketing writer/producer at WINK, the CBS affiliate in Fort Myers, in 1994. It was his first job out of college but he had interned at WBBM, CBS’s Chicago O&O.
He sent me his reel, on VHS of course, and I brought him in for an interview.
“We had a great interview,” Barry says. “You talked to me about the things you did there and about what it is that I thought I could contribute to what you were doing at WINK. I learned so much about the ability to work under a tight deadline, do it with grace, get it done and move on to the next day.”
From WINK, Barry moved to WAGA, the Fox Atlanta O&O, as a promo producer for three years. Then on to WSVN, the Fox affiliate in Miami.
“The formula of what I learned under you — to write and produce under pressure, under deadline, working directly with talent in the newsroom whether it’s shooting topicals or going out and shooting a promo — is the same skillset that I used to work with entertainment journalists, work a red carpet and go behind the scenes of a music video,” Barry says.
“It is the same skillset.”
Barry made the switch to entertainment news and moved to Los Angeles in 2002. Over the years, Barry worked in the unscripted, reality entertainment arena for shows such as Entertainment Tonight, Extra, Girls Behaving Badly, E! Fashion Police with the late Joan Rivers, YO! MTV Raps, and BET’s Mancave, among others.
While the formats of those shows may be different, “the ability to sell, to pull you in, to make it teasy, [is what] I began to exercise under you at WINK,” Barry says.
“I come from a world where we conceive it in the morning, we go out, we shoot it, we turn it and we deliver it that day.”
In 2014, Barry and Joe Braswell, another veteran television producer, founded Kelchris, a production company, with a specialization in non-scripted storytelling.
Along the way, Barry met and worked with well-known Hollywood stars.
Watch my Zoom interview with Steve Barry, an Englishman, as he details his career move up to and including being the showrunner for Small Fortune, a game show hosted by Lil Rel Howery, where contestants must interact with miniature versions of real world locations.
Steve Barry ends the interview with these words of encouragement:
“I would like to offer encouragement to my people of color, to women and the LGBT brothers, who may not necessarily have had the opportunities that they deserved. Believe in yourself and always do the best work that you can do with what opportunity you were given,” Barry says.
“No matter who you work with, make sure that your attitude is right, because those relationships along the way will take you to places that you don’t even know,” Barry says.
“There is room at the table for all of us.”
NOTE: When Steve Barry started working at WINK, he was fresh out of college. Like many in that situation, he didn’t have a reliable car. Several times I had to go pick him up when his car broke down. I reminded him of that in our interview and he says he now drives a new car. Here’s Barry next to his Audi.
Happy Trails Steve.
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