By Christina LeBlanc
Correspondent

Late Night Republic Mission Control (Visualization)

Jake Sasseville’s “Late Night Republic” is anything but conventional, right down to its producing style. While “Late Night Republic” and its host are based in New York, co-executive producer and chief strategist Mara Marich Tardy operates from Texas, in what the staff calls “Mission Control Houston.”

A Cable Ace and multiple BDA winner and Emmy nominee as writer, director and producer, with many years of experience working with MTV New York, Mara’s advertising and entertainment background make her an invaluable member of the “LNR” team – a team whose members span the country from Los Angeles (public relations) to San Francisco (digital) to Oklahoma (tour coordination) to New York (show production) to Florida (financial) and up to Maine (digital).

“It’s pretty interesting running a TV show this way,” she says. “I’ve been working with Jake for about a year and a half and it has almost always been remote. I like the challenge. And we work very well together.”

Despite the distance, if an in-person meeting needs to happen, it will happen. Once when Jake was flying from Los Angeles back to New York, “we felt the need to hook up in person because there was a lot of information to discuss,” Mara says. So she flew from Houston to Atlanta, where Jake was making a stop. They spent the day in the airport “having face-to-face meetings about different aspects of the business that were on the front burner at that moment, and it was very productive,” she laughs. “I never left the terminal for that meeting and neither did he!” After the meeting, they went to their respective gates; Jake flew back to New York and Mara back to Texas.

Flight Director Mara Marich Tardy

“We have a very flexible set up,” Mara says of the arrangement. “I don’t think it’s that we’re intentionally breaking the rules, I think it’s just that we are a team of like-minded people that happen to be geographically dispersed.” Jake has never been one to worry about breaking the rules, and that’s probably why he and Mara work well together.

“I’m a big fan of Mara’s,” Jake says. “I read about her in a magazine, researched and stalked her for six months online and on the phone. I bought her lunch in New York City and six months later we were working on revolutionizing late night together… I’m so grateful that she decided to work with me, and didn’t call the police instead.”

Mara’s “blend of maternal and kick-my-ass executive,” according to Jake, is part of what sets her apart. That, coupled with vast pop culture experience that spans four continents, makes her a crucial centerpiece to the “Late Night Republic” production team.

One of her key strengths is a background in both entertainment and advertising, which drew her to working with Jake and helps “Late Night Republic” perfect sponsorship integration. “We are well aware that TV viewers fast forward through commercials, and we’ve created an advertising model that works for us and our sponsors that is a response to TiVo culture, ” Mara explains, “so we’ve integrated our sponsor, Pringles Xtreme, into the content of the show itself.”

The show is poised to integrate more advertisers and sponsors (such as FRS Healthy Energy). Mara is the team member who talks to the sponsors, advertising agencies, the tv production crew and tour coordinators around the country every day. She considers it her responsibility to be a “home base, someone who’s the anchor” of the other, orbiting team members, “developing and fine-tuning business, marketing and communication strategy, reviewing show footage for brand consistency, gathering and disseminating information, and checking up on people every day and making sure things are in order and in line.” Despite the fact that she hasn’t met a lot of the people she works with on a daily basis, they maintain a streamlined system and keep in touch via email, video chat, text message, and phone.

There are some basic guidelines or “house rules” for producing from afar. “We try to operate through the New York time zone, since that’s where Jake is,” Mara says. She’s learned how each individual member of the team prefers to communicate but, if there’s a chance of miscommunication or a lot of information to share, they “go straight to the phone.” Most of all, there’s a strong support system and everyone backs each other up.

“We’re building a new business model and we’re building it day by day,” she says. “I’m comfortable with the quirks of the entertainment business… you have to be quite open-minded, which I guess we all are as part of this team. We have the seasoned, proven talent, and we can bring our experience to the table, together with the young guns, like Bobby Guerette and Whit Scott, and we can combine our perspectives into an old-school-new-school team. We work well together and we respect each other. I even hesitate to call it a company sometimes. It’s more like we are actually on a mission into the unknown, just like the astronauts when they ventured to the moon for the first time. It’s very exciting to be part of such an ambitious bunch of renegades with a strong vision.”

Journalist Christina LeBlanc is a special correspondent for “The Shake,” a 24/7 internal news site going behind-the-curtain of “Late Night Republic.”