A longtime duo’s Redondo-based production company is a force to be reckoned with in the reality TV industry.
Seasoned television executives J.D. Roth and Todd Nelson don’t quite look the part.
Clad in a grey hoodie and faded jeans, the blond, bespectacled Roth, 45, carries a vibrant boyish charm and a contagious enthusiasm. Nelson, 46, sporting a shaggy beard and a loose button-down on his tall surfer physique, exudes a laid-back vibe and seems a bit more demure than his partner.
Yet, the two are currently making some of the biggest ripples in reality television through their Redondo Beach-based company 3Ball Productions, which is also known as Eyeworks USA after the company was bought out by Dutch-based Eyeworks TV in 2010.
3Ball Production is widely known for creating and producing the “The Biggest Loser” (which just finished its 14th season), “Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition,” “Beauty and the Geek” and five-time Emmy-nominated “Endurance.”
Although their repertoire of themes spans across weight loss, love, survival, diving, money and more, a common thread runs through all the shows they produce: helping people transform their lives by pushing them beyond what they believe they’re capable of.
“If there’s a piece of life that you lost and want back, you end up in a chair facing me,” said Roth, a Philadelphia-native. “If you look at any of the shows we do, it’s about rehabbing someone’s life, helping someone to get a part of their life back. We all get used to a new normal, but you don’t have to.”
He calls this premise, “transformation television.”
True to its founders’ affinity for the beach and indifference to glamour, 3Balls occupies a modern, 40,000 square-foot building in Redondo Beach, a long drive from Hollywood and Burbank (where the big TV networks are based) but enviably close to the coast. Founded in 2001 on Roth’s front porch in Manhattan Beach, the co-CEOs currently oversee nearly 200 full-time employees and another 200 freelancers out on the field, all of whom they refer to as family.
The pair first crossed paths in 1988 at the KTLA studios in Hollywood, which housed the set of Fox’s kid’s television game show “Fun House.” Roth, at age 19, was the youngest game show host in history, and Nelson, then 20, was an up-and-coming producer.
When the show finished its three-year run, Roth was barraged with opportunities to host more shows. But with a decade of TV industry experience under his belt, the former child actor was thinking bigger. He wanted to create his own shows — specifically, a live national tour of “Fun House,” which he envisioned would present the game’s challenges to a live audience.
“I realized, if you want to be successful in this industry, ownership is everything,” Roth said. “You can’t be a meat puppet forever. I was always interested in the bigger picture.”
He shared his idea with Nelson, and he was in. However, Warner’s Bros, which owned the rights to “Fun House,” shut down his pitch, so Roth took matters into his own hands. After obtaining the show’s rights for free –“I begged and begged and begged,” he recalled – Roth made one phone call to corporate Six Flags and was booked in “every park in America,” he said.
The two youngsters were on the road all summer – in a limousine to boot, as neither was old enough to rent a car –putting on live game shows for children across the country. “We grew up fast,” Nelson said of the experience. “It was a lot of responsibilities, but the great thing about television is, if you put in the long hours and work hard, there’s no telling how far you can go.”
“I think what we didn’t realize then,”he added, “is we were perfecting our relationship for the future.”
Today, roughly two decades since the tour, the best friends, with their respective wives and children, live just seven houses away from each other on the Strand in Manhattan Beach. They are currently busy with their newest venture, ABC’s “Splash,” a celebrity diving competition show that premiered last month.
Roth noted that challenges lie ahead for the television industry as a growing demographic of “cord cutters” ditch network programming on TV to watch shows online – essentially “acting as their own TV programmers.”But he and Nelson remain firmly grounded in their philosophy of “transformation television.”
“No one has the answer yet, and no one knows what’s going to happen,” he said. “But I do know one thing: changing people’s lives will never go away. Whether it’s online or on prime time, people are always going watch interesting content that makes them feel.”
