Talking about herself? For almost an hour? Katherine Pope admits this is not the most appealing proposition.
"I’m from the Midwest, so talking about yourself is really not something that we Midwestern, Irish-Catholic people do," she explains over Zoom. But, for the sake of this story, the president of Sony Pictures Television Studios promises to do her best.
“I’m going to bring it,” she says gamely.
She starts at the beginning — her childhood. Pope lives in Los Angeles but hails from Chicago. She’s the youngest of three sisters, and no one in her family was in show business. Growing up, “I didn’t know anybody who did anything artistic, but my parents are huge readers,” says Pope, who didn’t watch much television as a child.
“I was only allowed to watch TV on Friday and Saturday nights. So that made it forbidden fruit,” she reflects, recalling that escapist fare like The Love Boat and Fantasy Island were among her favorite shows.
Given her lack of access to television five days a week, Pope spent a lot of time reading. “I was a bookworm. I still am,” she says, citing books as the genesis for her love of storytelling. “For me, it always starts on the page, imagining other lives, other worlds.”
After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York (where she had no major because the school did not require students to declare them), Pope began producing documentaries and specials at CBS and ABC News. She fell in love with making scripted television when she was hired as an associate at NBC Studios in the late 1990s.
She still remembers her first day at NBC. Someone dumped a huge pile of scripts on her desk, and Pope felt like it was Christmas morning. After she read the first one, "I was like, ‘This is absolutely what I’m supposed to be doing.’ It was just heavenly," she says, "and I still feel that way."
In her decade at NBC Universal, Pope rose to executive vice president of the network and president of the studio, developing hit shows like Friday Night Lights, 30 Rock and The Office. In 2008, she was let go along with other top programming executives when NBC “cleaned house,” as Deadline put it at the time.
She went on to launch the television division at Peter Chernin’s 20th Century Fox–based Chernin Entertainment, overseeing creative development and production. “She was the very first person I hired. She just seemed super smart, and I enjoyed being with her. That’s always a good start,” recalls Chernin, who also notes that Pope had — and still has — an excellent reputation among writers and creative people.
Pope developed series such as Touch, Breakout Kings and Terra Nova at Chernin Entertainment. “The biggest hit we had together, which was New Girl, was entirely her,” Chernin says. Pope was an executive producer of that Fox sitcom, which Liz Meriwether created and also executive-produced.
Chernin credits Pope with championing Meriwether. “I think she had written one or two plays and a small movie,” he says, referring to Ivan Reitman’s 2011 rom-com No Strings Attached. “It was Katherine who found her, found the idea for the show, really backed her and helped her develop into one of the most meaningful television creators of the past 10 years.”
New Girl was the start of a long and fruitful creative partnership — Pope also executive-produced two other Meriwether series: Hulu’s The Dropout and FX’s Dying for Sex.
“My partnership with Liz has been one of the biggest gifts of my life, both personally and professionally,” Pope says. “To work alongside someone like Liz, who was always so gifted and just continues to grow and grow, is inspiring. And I’m so, so proud of the work. She never stops pushing to make every second of her shows great.”
Following her run at Chernin Entertainment, Pope’s next big career move took her to Charter Communications as senior vice president and head of original content. There, she launched Spectrum Originals and brought a number of premium series to fruition, including Sony-produced projects like the drama series L.A.’s Finest, the limited-series revival of Mad About You and the limited series A Spy Among Friends.
After more than four years at Charter, Pope took on her current role, president of Sony Pictures Television Studios. While she had thought about starting her own production company, "I just got excited about Sony’s mission — being an independent studio, really being aligned with the creators," she says.
Pope joined Sony in August 2022 (replacing Jeff Frost, who left and formed his own production company). Ravi Ahuja, president and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, calls her a fantastic studio executive. "Her creative skills are great, which is foundational for that job," he says. "The unique thing about Katherine is she’s been in every role in the business. She’s been a buyer, she’s been a seller, she’s been a producer. So, she’s able to look at all issues from everyone’s viewpoint."
Keith Le Goy, chairman of Sony Pictures Television, adds, "To be successful in this role requires great creative judgment, clear-sighted vision, bravery, amazing relationships with creators and customers and a real understanding of the myriad audiences we serve."
All qualities that Pope possesses, Le Goy says.
At Sony Pictures Television, she oversees the studio’s scripted production business, which includes popular and critically acclaimed shows like The Boys and its Gen V spinoff, as well as Cobra Kai, Outlander, Dark Matter, The Last of Us, Long Bright River and the highly anticipated Outlander prequel series Blood of My Blood. Coming up, Pope has Spider-Noir and an untitled Vince Gilligan project. Children’s programming and Sony’s growing scripted presence on YouTube are also hers.
It’s a lot to manage, but Pope has put together “a really good team, and she’s a very good leader of that team,” Ahuja says. “Parts of that team service not just Katherine’s group but other television groups, like the game show group and unscripted and international. There’s a research team, a marketing team, a team that works across YouTube. So, all those things sit underneath Katherine, and she’s just a really strong manager. A very, very good manager,” he says. “You really don’t see that very often — a TV studio head who’s also a really good manager.”
When she first joined Sony three years ago, Pope did her homework, embarking on a deep dive into everything that Sony had sold, everything that was in development and the trajectory of those shows. "I remember saying to [executive vice president and head of creative affairs, Sony Pictures Television Studios] Lauren Stein and [executive vice president, drama development, Sony Pictures Television] Andrew Plotkin, ‘You guys have such an incredible conversion rate. You don’t sell everything you pitch, but the things you sell very, very often go to series. You’re magicians. How do you do it?’"
The duo told her that any executive at a streamer or network who buys from Sony Pictures Television has to justify going out of house to make the purchase. “That was a really big revelation to me,” Pope says. “We have to bring the thing that they can’t get from their own studio.”
Sometimes that’s IP, which Sony has a lot of. HBO’s hit The Last of Us is based on a PlayStation game, as is Peacock’s Twisted Metal and Prime Video’s upcoming God of War. Sony IP also includes the aforementioned Cobra Kai and Gen V as well as Vought Rising (a prequel to The Boys), and the recently announced S.W.A.T. spinoff, S.W.A.T. Exiles.
Whether a new show is based on IP, a book or a fresh idea from a writer, it has to be original. “We have to look at things in a way that other people wouldn’t think about,” Pope explains. “What’s the scary thing? What’s the risky thing? We have sort of a pressure on ourselves to be like, what is the view that hasn’t been done before? Or what is the view that’s just so specific that no one else could do it? That’s a huge part of what we do.”
The complete version of this article originally appeared in emmy Magazine, issue # 10, 2025, under the title: "Strong Suit."
