The night before producer Sarah Aubrey's first day on the film set of Bad Santa, she found out she was pregnant with her first child.
She would keep the news to herself for three months, leaving colleagues to draw their own conclusions.
"I was nauseous for weeks, napped during lunchtimes, and I overheard [producer] John Cameron saying he didn't know if I was going to make it in this business," she says, laughing.
Over the next decade, Aubrey went on to multiple successes in film and television, partnering with Peter Berg in their production company, Film 44, The two produced the feature Friday Night Lights and were executive producers on the NBC series based on the movie.
For HBO, their credits include The Leftovers, the drama starring Justin Theroux; a sports documentary series, State of Play, and On Freddie Roach, a reality series about a boxing trainer struggling with Parkinson's disease.
Aubrey's work on Friday Night Lights caught the eye of then-NBC president Kevin Reilly (now president of TNT and TBS), who recruited her to become executive vice-president of original programming for TNT. Her charge: to push the drama-focused network toward edgier material.
"There's a lot of dark material with antiheroes being done right now," Aubrey says. "It's hard to mix serious drama with humor, but we see an opportunity to tell sophisticated stories with complex characters, humor, sexiness and muscularity."
In other words, the needle is moving away from procedurals like The Closer and Rizzoli & isles to the kind of serial shows that fans binge-watch on Netflix and HBO, with a target audience of men and women in their mid-forties.
The first pick-ups to air under Aubrey's watch will be Good Behavior, the story of a con woman-thief whose life is constantly going awry, and Animal Kingdom, an adaptation of the 2010 Australian film. Both are scheduled to air this summer.
The TNT version of the Aussie crime drama will be a mash-up of blue-collar culture and the life of a mob family, set in a southern California beach town. "It'll be swagger and wink, as opposed to just gritty," Aubrey says,
Originally from Austin, Texas, Aubrey began her career as an entertainment attorney, working on corporate law and representing the Playboy Network in its merger with companies in Latin America. "I realized no one was go¬ ing to take script notes from an attorney, so I left the firm to join John Cameron to produce Bad Santa for the Coen brothers and Bob Weinstein," she says,
With female producers still relatively scarce in Hollywood, Aubrey is focused on cultivating diverse viewpoints — both in terms of race and gender — in front of and behind the camera.
Meanwhile, the mother of three adeptly juggles family and career. "I was nine months' pregnant with my third baby on the set of The Leftovers," Aubrey recalls. "It was so hot, and the guys were a little horrified, having me walk around pregnant. But it's good for men to see that a woman can do it all."
