When people reflect on their careers, conversations tend toward the serious.  Even those who love their work can sound coldly detached.  However, when Izzie Pick Ibarra (pictured above), executive producer and showrunner of Fox’s The Masked Singer – the first new hit television series of 2019 -- reflects on work she frequently breaks into laughter, even when talking about difficult times.  Pick Ibarra is, as she puts it, “in a very happy place because I just did a show that I was allowed to let loose on.  I had great support from Fox.  I feel really creatively fulfilled.”

When flesh-eating, blood-guzzling zombies lurk, it takes a special kind of writer to make you focus on a single relationship amid the chaos of it all.  Liz Heldens, showrunner for Fox’s new hit thriller The Passage, crafted the series so the infected former humans remain terrifying but not as compelling as the plight of a girl and her unlikely savior.

An old-fashioned rap battle, a modern interpretive dance and a fourth wall that’s more of a doorway mark National Geographic's latest foray into the hybrid of scripted and unscripted series with Valley of the Boom.  The six-episode series, premiering Sunday, Jan. 13, recounts the story of three internet companies in Silicon Valley during those raucous 1990s.  While based in fact, the series uses far more fantasy than usually found on the network.  Carolyn Bernstein, National Geographic’s Executive Vice President and Head of Global Scripted Development and Production, told MediaVillage how it meshed perfectly with the brand’s mission of going “further.”  Noting that Valley explores much of the technology and access that today are taken for granted, Bernstein said,  “The three stories will take viewers very deep into the early days of Silicon Valley and give them a much deeper understanding where this technology we use every single day comes from and how we got to the moment we are in right now.”