“Skyscraper Live” chronicled Alex Honnold’s historic climb atop the 101-story Taipei 101 building in Taiwan, streaming live on Netflix.
For an hour and 31 minutes, the professional rock climber captivated audiences online and in person as he overcame the challenging trek without ropes or a safety net. By the time he made it to the top of the almost 1,700-feet-long structure, Primsoll Productions CEO Grant Mansfield breathed a sigh of relief as he sat in the live show’s control room, watching his subject achieve a historic sporting achievement and a triumph for the first Netflix offering of its kind.
“When a live show finishes successfully, one is always relieved,” Mansfield, an executive producer on the project, told TheWrap. “But I think there was double relief yesterday, because we all cared a huge a month about the fact he was doing that extraordinary thing.”
It certainly felt extraordinary to watch Honnold free solo climb one of the tallest buildings in the world, in the special hosted by Netflix anchor Elle Duncan, featuring a panel discussion with WWE superstar Seth Rollins and climbing expert Emily Harrington. The event streamed live on Saturday, after a one-day postponement due to weather conditions.
The show inspired considerable conversation online, as people expressed both horror and pride as they watched Honnold conquer this lifelong dream climb. Viewership numbers will be available should “Skyscraper Live” make it onto the weekly Netflix Top 10 list, set for release on Tuesday. But it’s clear the event proved audience appetite for live programming, just as Netflix expands its pursuit of housing the spectacle.
“Live TV is still magical, even in this day and age. There’s still something in the idea of bringing everybody together to share an extraordinary moment,” Mansfield said. Below, the veteran TV producer breaks down creating the high-stakes TV special, and what the industry can learn from the big event. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: Congratulations on an impressive special with “Skyscraper Live!” At what point during the show did you know you had struck gold here?
Mansfield: When he finally reached the top, to be perfectly honest. It’s quite an interesting experience making a show like this. You are focused on making a great show and telling the story to the best of your abilities, but you’re sitting in the back of the control room and you’re making editorial decisions. But obviously you’re very aware that there’s a man climbing up that building without a rope, where the consequences of a mistake are really, really serious. All of us have emotional skin in the game, because we’ve worked with Alex for the last five years.
To a certain extent, when a live show finishes successfully, one is always relieved. But I think there was double relief yesterday, because we all cared a huge amount about the fact he was doing that extraordinary thing.
The show gave viewers an all-access view of Alex Honnold’s climb atop Taipei 101. What does it take in terms of planning and man power to make this live show happen?
It’s a very long process. The planning started a couple of years back. To create a project which culminates in that kind of excitement, a global event, this answer is really about prosaic stuff at the front end. It’s about coming up with the idea of finding a building that Alex feels comfortable with and feels excited by, but then it’s a whole bunch of seeking and getting a whole bunch of permissions. You may know that there have been attempts in the past by other production companies to get permission to climb this building, and they’ve all been pushed back. So we had a big job to do convincing the people that run the building, and the government here, that this was a good idea. There are huge upsides in terms of marketing for them — marketing the building, and the lovely country. But the downside is pretty, pretty obvious. So that took a time.
And then it’s a huge team effort with more than 100 people, incredible camera operators, incredible producers, and probably the most important thing of the lot, an incredible safety company. We’re used to working in, I guess, hostile environments — my company Plimsoll — so we work with a company called Secret Compass, who helps assess and mitigate risk. I have chaired as many safety meetings as I have had creative meetings in the last 18 months, because the single most important thing is that no harm comes to Alex.
It’s such an endeavor and went off without a hitch. It must have been crazy to be in that control room for every moment, watching the climb as emotionally invested as you are, but also invested in pulling off this show at the same time. How did that feel as you made real-time decisions and watched it happen?
It was tense. It’s always tense in a live gallery. But, yeah, there was that extra element of tension.
What was fascinating was that there were so many people who had emotional skin in the game. I mean, you saw some incredible pictures of camera operators on the end of cables who were filming it. They are all Alex’s friends as well. We’ve been a team for the last five or six years because we;ve made several other shows with Alex. He likes to be around people. The entire camera crew know and are friendly with Alex.
Alex did this climb with a massive audience both online and in person, and the people inside the building also interacted with him. Was it ever in consideration to remove that potential distraction or was that part of the appeal of doing something like this in a building?
That’s a really good question, and a legitimate question. We debated a lot. Climbing in general, and free soloing in particular, is a very solo thing. People tend to do it without any kind of audience. One of our panelists yesterday, who’s a climbing expert herself and a friend of Alex’s, said she’d never seen Alex free solo before.
We wanted to create an environment around Alex in the run-up to this, where he wasn’t stressed out in any way at all, and we discussed all of this in great detail. There were two phases to it. There was the prep and the climb itself. In the prep phase, he wanted us to create a kind of bubble around him. His wife was down here with him, but we created a space where he could keep to himself. In fact, Brooke Fisher, our PR, had a rather brilliant idea of having a table tennis table put in his room. If you ever go to Alex’s house, which I have done in the past, you’re always challenged to play a game of table tennis. He normally beats everybody.
So Brooke had this fantastic idea that we should put a table tennis table in his room, which he absolutely loved, and periodically, he invited small members of the team that he knows to get behind the table tennis. But essentially, he was kind of hermetically sealed in that environment in the run-up, so he was in the right headspace. When it came to the climb itself, he knew there’d be people on the streets. He knew there would be people inside the building, and he just said, “I think that’ll be cool. I’m happy about that.” Alex is a very single-minded individual, but I think he really fed off the energy of the crowd yesterday. Didn’t you get that sense?
Definitely. He said that he now knows how people in the NFL feel performing their sport and watching the crowd go wild in return, which I thought was such a great sentiment from him.
For me, it was lovely to see that, because he is quite a shy, humble guy. One of the things that we all love about Alex is that, obviously, he’s one of the greatest all around athletes on the planet. But he’s a man, I think, completely devoid of ego. He’s not a natural showman, but it was lovely to see him gain such pleasure and encouragement from the crowd.
The people of Taiwan and this city have been unbelievably wonderful and supportive. They’ve taken this climb to their hearts. There have been big signs everywhere on the buildings saying, “Go Alex.” I think he really responded to that. I think they helped him climb that building, actually. I don’t think they were a distraction.
Alex’s wife Sanni was featured throughout the climb, and even got to say hi to him about halfway through the climb for the cameras. How did you figure out how to incorporate these moments into the show and how was it getting Sanni to participate?
The show has been meticulously planned. That’s the creative bit of it for the last year. And you know, even with a live event like this, you create a storyboard. There were certain things about this that were very predictable, so we had spent a lot of time planning. We had BT inserts. We spent a lot of time planning when we would go inside and outside the building. There’s clearly flexibility to respond to what’s going on outside. And we went off script from time to time. But there was, frankly, a certain predictability about this, which helps our planning.
In terms of his wife, I went out to Vegas in October and I spent time with both of them. We had, we had dinner, and cocktails around at their house at the end of the day, when their kids were there. We talked to Sanni and she wanted to be a part of it. As you’ll know if you’ve seen the “Free Solo” film, the beginning of their romance was captured in that show. And I think they are a genuine double act.
She wanted to be a part of it. And she’s absolutely brilliant on camera. She gets to go climbing with Alex. In terms of the storytelling, having her there gave us another element. And I thought, a really lovely moment, at the top of the building, when he finally came back down, that moment between the two of them, where they were taking selfies, it was so real and so emotional.
I was looking at Instagram posts. There have been a whole bunch of them, but I think one of the most shared Instagram posts is not the climb. It’s the two of them embracing and chatting very naturally on top of the building.
This is the first time a live climbing special like this has happened on television, and the response has been impressive. What lessons are you taking away from pulling this off?
The big lesson, maybe for the industry as a whole, is that live TV still has that unique ability to bring people together in a way that television used to do back in the day, with the old broadcast networks.
What is brilliant about Netflix’s strategy is they’ve recognized that you can go back to the future with this. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Streaming platforms — which have built their success on the back of the fact they don’t need schedules and you just turn up, like a library, and pick any show, anytime you want it — they’ve realized that there is real, real power, and I guess commercial return, in finding events that can bring the world together. That’s the big takeaway. If you get the project right, you can attract a global audience.
The other thing that TV can do, which I think people forget about sometimes, is it can enable people to fulfill their dreams. Sometimes there’s a certain amount of cynicism around TV, but the truth is that Alex was only able to make this climb because Netflix and Plimsoll, my company, enabled it. This wasn’t a TV stunt. It wasn’t us going to him and saying, “How about this?” He’s wanted to do this climb for 13 years, but couldn’t do it without all the permissions. So, it was a great TV show. But also, I’m really delighted that we were able to help Alex fulfill a dream.
After the climb was over, I went up near the top and Alex just threw his arms around me and just said, “Thanks, man.” I think it’s a win all round on that basis.
Commentary from Elle Duncan and the rest of the team pointed out the danger to this mission, and shared the facts as well as the anxiety and fear that came with watching Alex attempt this live. How did the team craft the tone for the show?
In terms of tone we, first and foremost, wanted it to be an entertainment event. It’s a kind of hybrid sports event. So what we wanted to do is a mixture of experts from their field, and I suppose, what you would broadly call super fans. We had expertise on the panel with a fellow climber that knows Alex well, and a play-by-play person that could talk about the technical stuff.
I think audiences want some explanation, not too much, but they want a bit of granular detail about how you make a climb like that work. But you don’t want too much. We wanted to articulate what we thought the audience might be thinking. And I think that’s a really big part of the panel, and to a certain extent, Mark as well. You’re trying to hit a balance between making sure the event is entertaining, but properly honoring the sporting achievement that’s taking place. Having reviewed the program again this morning, I think we got that balance pretty well right, to be perfectly honest.
Alex said he has some smaller climbs in mind to tackle next along with training, but the world now has a taste for high-risk entertainment like this, and Netflix surely will want to do more. What do you want to tackle next?
We’ve got a whole bunch of ideas, which we can’t really discuss at this time. With and without Alex. And we’re talking to Netflix, of course, but we’re also talking to other streamers and broadcasters. So, you know, we’ll see. But we’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and we will be taking out a bunch of new ideas to several of our key clients over the next few months.
That’s really exciting. You talked about this a little bit but live TV and live programming is something that has always gathered the most viewership, but streamers are jumping into the fray with events like this as well as sports rights. In leading a production company, what’s the limit to the ideas you can come up with in this growing space?
There’s a real appetite, particularly on Netflix, who I think have done a brilliant job at capturing live events and bringing some large audiences. But as you might expect, the bar is very high. You’ve got to find an event that captures the public imagination. An event that the runtime is at maximum two hours. Generally speaking, it’s based around a single premise, something where you can tell a really compelling story across, say, 90 minutes with lots of highs and lows, lots of twists and turns.
When you apply those kinds of criteria, you realize that although you’re pushing an open door in terms of willingness to hear new ideas, there’s very few ideas that tick all those boxes. Our job as a production company is to come up with those ideas. I know Netflix receives thousands of pitches of this kind. In fact, they told us they did. And when we walked through the door with this, they were instantly engaged with it. But these ideas don’t grow on trees. So, we got to go and our thinking caps on. We’ve got a couple of other things in mind, but yeah, it requires a lot of thought on the part of our development group to come up with ideas that deliver this kind of impact.
Netflix is, as you said, really making noise in the live genre. What other platforms do you think are going to be next to jump into this type of programming?
I think all the streamers, really — we’re having discussions with them. The big ones now are buying rights for sports and having some real success with that. We operate in a very, I don’t know if it’s a unique space, but an unusual space. We are not a production company that’s going to televise existing events. Our job is to create events. But I think all the streamers are looking at that, and by the way, so are broadcast networks.
I think live TV is still magical, even in this day and age. There’s still something in the idea of bringing everybody together to share an extraordinary moment. It’s what sports do regularly, of course. The challenge for us is, can we come up with events that capture the public imagination in the same way sports do, and grab global audiences. It’s a challenging ambition, but I think it’s a really exciting one.
“Skyscraper Live is now streaming on Netflix.
