Chances are Mark Duplass is most recognizable to the general public from his role on The Morning Show as Reese Witherspoon’s frumpy producer, but real Letterboxd heads know him as a longtime indie-film stalwart. Since he and brother Jay — both writers, actors, directors, and producers — broke out with the road-trip character drama Puffy Chair in 2005, reportedly made for just $15,000, they’ve quietly built a prolific body of work through Duplass Brothers Productions, the company they co-founded with collaborator Mel Eslyn. Even as Hollywood moved through from the indie-film boom of the 2000s to the golden streaming era to the precarious business of today, their scrappy spirit has endured, yielding an eclectic output that spans Colin Trevorrow’s 2012 film, Safety Not Guaranteed (one of the most influential films of its decade, also made for a pittance), to distinctly Netflix-y docuseries like Wild Wild Country to critically beloved TV shows like HBO’s Somebody Somewhere.

Lately, the team has been experimenting with a new way of making TV, one more like how indie films are produced. Traditionally, TV creators pitch ideas for shows to big studios, which take on the risk by fronting the money to get the project rolling and then own the final product. But instead of handing their shows over, Duplass Brothers Productions acts as its own studio by assuming the financial risk to make its series itself (it knows how to keep budgets low) while ultimately controlling how it makes money back, whether it’s through licensing deals or selling seasons directly to viewers. “We basically function like Warner Brothers TV,” Duplass explains. “We do everything and then we look at the value of these deals and decide which is best for us.”

That arrangement gives them the freedom to make interesting television on their own terms. Duplass teamed up with Eslyn and used a portion of his Morning Show salary to write, direct, and produce Penelope, a meditative and largely silent YA series starring Megan Stott about a young girl who decides to break away from society and wander the woods. They licensed U.S. streaming rights to Netflix for a set fee and period, while retaining ownership and international licensing rights. Penelope debuted in September and briefly broke into the platform’s Top Ten charts, later earning two Gotham Awards nominations. In November, another Duplass-produced indie TV project, The Creep Tapes, which adapts their popular Creep films, hit the horror streaming service Shudder via another licensing deal.

Penelope and The Creep Tapes weren’t the Duplasses’ first forays into indie TV, but they landed during a particularly shaky moment in Hollywood. With streamers under pressure to cut costs, the indie model seemed like a win-win-win: cheaper content for streamers, creative freedom and ownership for creators, and more dynamic shows for viewers. And for a moment, it felt like the model was taking off. But half a year later, the momentum has stalled. The clearest sign: Duplass Brothers Productions struggled to find a workable deal for its latest project, The Long Long Night. The six-episode dark comedy follows two well-meaning middle-aged men, played by Duplass and the actor Barret O’Brien, who decide the best thing they can do to help the world is end their lives. Told nonlinearly and partly through Zoom calls and phone video recordings, the show leans into a formally experimental style. Though Duplass says it received a warm response from distributors, he wasn’t satisfied with the deals on the table. So, for now, they’ve chosen to self-distribute — releasing it via Kinema, a platform on which viewers can rent to watch directly, and Seed&Spark, a crowdfunding service they hope will build community around the project.

“We have to be realistic here,” says Duplass. “Not a lot of people have heard of Kinema. But the show was so cheap for us to make that if all that happens is we bring some awareness to a new distribution model and maybe make our money back, we can live to fight another day.”

You came up as an indie filmmaker, and the bet there was straightforward. If you, acting as the studio, can keep costs low, the upside could be tremendous because what a distributor pays for its rights can be astronomically high in comparison, at least back in the heyday of indie film. How does the bet work with streaming television today?
Great question. My real answer is that I don’t know. We’re right in the middle of it. I feel like I’m swimming in the middle of the ocean. Sometimes the tides go my way and I get excited, sometimes I’m underwater.

When I started moving into independent TV, the idea was very clear. The profit margins that used to exist in independent film, the types of things they used to buy and get behind in the market — that has all changed. The streamers came in, blew up the amount of content we could see, which devalued that content, and now they’re being safer with their bets. They’re not going to spend $4 million on The Overnight at Sundance anymore, a film that I was able to make for a few hundred thousand dollars and have this confluence of commerce and artistic freedom to do exactly what I wanted. I felt the squeeze on that.

That’s why I went into television. They wanted us. I thought, Well, you know what? In television, they’re not really knowledgeable about how cheap things can be made the way that independent film executives are. Maybe I can have those wonderfully increased profit margins and still maintain that artistic freedom I want. That definitely was the case with Animals, Room 104, The Creep Tapes, and Penelope. I just happened to do the last two at a time when the TV space started to collapse for the same reasons the film space collapsed.

So what do we do now? My argument is that you should be taking bets on these little lottery-ticket shows. I believe in my heart that no one can predict what the culture wants, so you have just as good a shot of having a “hit” with us as we’ve seen with something like Squid Game, which was a cheap acquisition, or Baby Reindeer, which cost nothing. We’re seeing these things work. Penelope just got nominated for two TV Gotham Awards, one of the few Netflix shows that got nominated. We weren’t even a Netflix original. They didn’t put a dollar into promoting our show, and it cut through. The Creep Tapes is the No. 1 show on Shudder and it costs very little for them.

I’m hoping we can build a real ecosystem of indie television the way that, from the late ’90s through today — even though it’s not as healthy anymore — there is a true indie-film ecosystem. TV festivals like SeriesFest in Denver or ATX Fest in Austin can become marketplaces that executives are forced to go to because, if they don’t get in there to buy that show in the room, they’re going to miss out. I truly believe there’s a confluence of interests here, if we can create all the things that worked for us in the ’90s. The streamers need awards. They have to spend less on shows. My whole business model has been based on: “Companies normally pay X for things. They’re thrilled that Duplass Brothers can deliver it to them for 0.5x. I can make it for 0.25x and everybody wins.”

Do streaming’s economics make the bet more difficult to parse? Movie-ticket sales were a straightforward measure. Studios could easily tell if you quadrupled the investment …
The numbers are real. But in streaming, it’s very arbitrary, right?

Right. And if the goal is subscriber retention, it’s hard to tell without access to the data whether Penelope added new young viewers or whatever. I mean, Netflix knows, but you don’t.
They definitely know. Six years ago, Room 104 was a massive success for HBO because the price they paid for it was much less than they pay for a normal half-hour show. It was Duplass Brothers–branded, it was cheap for them to produce, and they could air it late at night on Friday, which was not a premium slot. It got them great reviews. It did solid, mid-range numbers. Since it had some genre elements, it had foreign value. So a low-cost show bringing in good money, a small sliver of viewership, and prestige — that was a no-brainer. I think if I pitched Room 104 today, everybody passes, and the main thing they’d say is “Well, does it move the needle? Am I really going to be able to maintain those subscribers?”

My answer to that is a show like Adolescence. That’s exactly the show you would pass on because you would think there’s no way it will give subscribers what they want. But you never really know what’s going to hit, so you shouldn’t be shutting these things off because of some mandate. There are other things that make a show worthwhile. I don’t want to be reductive, but in general, the streamers are looking for bigger clear-cut hits and that makes them less excited to try stuff like The Long Long Night and see what it does. And if they’re willing to take a shot, it’s the five-cent shot, which might not be valuable to me anymore.

Walk me through your experience with The Long Long Night.
It was originally going to be a movie, but as we were putting it together, we realized we wanted to keep revisiting these guys. We wanted to go beyond the night they tried to kill themselves, but we also didn’t want it to be a two-and-a-half-hour movie. It doesn’t feel like it deserves to be that. There’s something comically episodic about this thing. That’s how we decided to reverse engineer it and split it up into six episodes.

After we shot the new scenes and rebuilt it as a series, we took it to Tribeca Film Festival in 2023, and it played great there. Then, thinking strategically, I felt that if I wanted to make a big case for independent television, I had to first bring out something that would really hit the culture. I hadn’t even tried to sell The Long Long Night just yet. We premiered it and got great press, then I pulled it back and put Penelope forward at Sundance and sold it to Netflix. I thought, Great, here we go. We’re starting to move. Then I took The Creep Tapes out, and we sold that to Shudder successfully.

I was scared to try something new because nothing was selling at that time, but I felt confident these two could work. Then all this noise started about “the Duplass Brothers starting to do independent television,” and everybody got excited seeing what we were doing. That’s when I took The Long Long Night around — not everywhere, but to most of the streamers — and I got similar feedback: “This is fascinating. This is great. We love this. We want to support indie TV. Yes, we want to do it.” But also: “Here’s five cents.”

You’re saying streamers were offering deals that wouldn’t even cover costs.
Some would, some wouldn’t.

How much did you make The Long Long Night for? More expensive than Puffy Chair, but cheaper than the $750,000 you spent to make Safety Not Guaranteed?
I think that’s fair.

That’s still much less than a standard episode of television, which I believe tends to be around $3 million.
The traditional model when you’re talking about a half-hour of television can range anywhere from half a million dollars an episode to $6 million an episode with a big cast and big salaries. I’m self-financing all of these things, by the way. This is the Cassavetes model: I go act on The Morning Show and Good American Family, take part of my salary, and invest it in ourselves. That’s traditionally worked well for us. But we’re in the hardest moment of self-financing and trying to get your money back. We’re at a crossroads. On the one hand, it’s like, “Hey, if somebody wants to come in and offer us a huge number to buy worldwide rights to our show forever, and there’s enough profit for me and my collaborators, why not say ‘yes’ to it?” At the same time, I have to be forward-thinking. These companies are buying less. They’re vertically integrating. There’s going to be fewer of them. So what’s my future, and what’s the future of independent storytelling, if there are only three buyers and there’s not enough profit for everybody? You look at comedians who go behind paywalls. You look at Patreon. Is there a model where I can self-distribute for a better deal than I get from the streamers?

So the hard answer for The Long Long Night, but the right one, is that even though I can probably get my money back by selling it to a distributor who’s just going to throw it on their platform and not promote it, that doesn’t help me build anything. So why not risk losing some money trying a self-distribution strategy?

Hence the arrangement with Kinema and Seed&Spark. It’s an in-between phase. Not quite throwing it up on YouTube, but still far from selling rights to a streamer.
Exactly. A “hybrid model” is the best way I can describe it. Remember, I still own this thing outright. There’s a larger library play for Duplass Brothers Productions in the future. The more titles we own, the more those become greater than the sum of their parts. I don’t feel comfortable advocating for a lot in the independent creative community right now — it’s really tough out there — but I do believe that, in the long run, if you can find ways to not lose too much money and keep cranking out a bank of titles, you’ll probably make a few things that you can license out in retirement through the years.

In September, when you spoke to Matt Belloni on The Town, you predicted that streamers were a year away from grokking the value of the indie TV model you’re putting forward. We’re about a half-year in. How’s the prediction going?
Yeah. I think we’re going to need some more time. [Laughs.] Although things shift quickly, so who really knows? What’s needed is a threat on the other side of it. If content creators like the Duplass Brothers are just going to go start YouTubing or Tubi-ing or Kinema-ing or servicing straight to VOD and taking that content away… It doesn’t have to be an all-or-none model. I can say to them, “If you can’t pay me the big whopping fee, it’s okay. We can still be buddies. Come do a short license. Let’s go nonexclusive, and we’ll live to fight another day and chase success.” I’m not looking to break anybody’s bank. I want us all to be healthy. Let’s test the waters together and see how it goes.

Lately, YouTube has been trying to position itself as the future of television, while Netflix is now licensing content from YouTube.
I know, it’s crazy.

When does YouTube start to get appealing to you as a space to make and distribute work?
It’s becoming appealing. We’re talking about it. There are a few interested sponsors who would like us to consider starting a good YouTube channel. Here’s the thing that I’m hesitant about: The amount and the consistency with which you have to create in order to have a successful YouTube channel is anathema to a healthy, balanced life for me. I’m not saying this is true for everyone, but in short, I don’t know if I want to do what’s required. That might change. We might find a model for YouTube that works for us eventually. I don’t know.

Are you more or less optimistic about things than you were five years ago?
Let me put it this way: Five years ago was an easier time, for sure, but I was completely dependent on the existing ecosystem of the streamers. It was fine because it was working. Now that it’s not working as well, I’ve been forced to open up this road that could be an unbelievable road for us if we get it right. If I can put a dollar into making independent TV the way I want to make it, with no creative boundaries, and if I can get a dollar and 25 cents back no matter what happens through whatever new distribution model emerges, that will be better than any place I’ve been in this industry.

Related

• Even Netflix Is Jealous of YouTube
• Everyone Is Already Using AI (And Hiding It)
• Hollywood Has Left Los Angeles

 The indie film market collapsed. Then the TV business. His model fuses both at a fraction of the cost.