To find new shows, Comedy Central identifies bright talents, invites them to pitch and, if that pitch doesn’t work, asks them to pitch some more. On Fridays, the network holds what’s known as a pitch-grid meeting, where members of the talent and development departments gather, “from the executives down to the assistants,” Alterman said, “and we just go through what shows people have seen, what talent meetings have come in, what pitches are on the books.” Discussions unfurl about which projects to pursue, based both on a sense of the balance across the network’s slate — Are we leaning too niche? Could we use another reality show?— and on each idea’s individual strengths. To this end, Alterman instituted a network policy by which pilots are screened internally not only for executives, as was customary, but also for assistants and interns. Their feedback is reported to Alterman, Herzog and Ganeless, who retain decision-making power.

Image Credit... Portrait by Kyle Hilton. Figures: Comedy Central and Nielsen Media Research.

Comedy Central has a distinct advantage when it comes to helping fledgling stars break out: It can use its own airwaves. In 2011, when the network was plotting its “Roast of Charlie Sheen,” a surefire ratings bonanza, Alterman told Sheen’s people that the dais should include the comedian Amy Schumer — little known, at the time, beyond the New York club scene and the viewership of “Last Comic Standing,” a reality series on which she was a contestant. “They didn’t know Amy, so they kept saying no, and I kept saying yeah, and I went to the mat,” Alterman said. “They finally said O.K. And at the after-party, they were asking Amy if she wanted to be in Charlie’s next project” — “Anger Management” — “because they were so taken by her.” Schumer’s show-stealing performance that night built awareness of her in advance of her sketch series, which was nearly two years off. “We knew we were going to shoot a pilot, but we were still developing the idea,” Schumer said. This was a function of both strategy and economy on the network’s part. “We’re basically filling content as we’re developing talent,” Alterman said. “The development pipeline becomes a content pipeline.”

In rare cases, when Comedy Central has an especially high level of interest in a performer, it will offer an umbrella development deal, encompassing various projects and commitments, in exchange for an exclusive on that performer’s television work. It struck one of these in 2012 with the buzzed-about Brooklyn-based comic Hannibal Buress, providing him with a stand-up special, a pilot and a recurring role on “Broad City.” Last year, Buress delivered his pilot. The proposed show was called “Unemployable” and would feature Buress working different real-life jobs; in the first episode, he labored on a goat farm. “It wasn’t quite working, but there was one bit, where Hannibal wonders why farmers need to get up so early, that we loved,” Alterman said. The network passed but encouraged Buress and his showrunner, Jeff Stilson, to develop a new series driven by that wryly inquisitive spirit. “The idea now is that I’ll tackle different subjects with monologues, man-on-the-street interviews, sketches,” Buress said. “So I can do some of the field stuff we were going to do on ‘Unemployable,’ but we’re not constricted — we have more flexibility.” The series — titled: “Why? With Hannibal Buress” — will make its debut in July.

Alterman develops and produces with a budget somewhere between $250 million and $350 million, significantly smaller than the development budgets at broadcast networks or, for that matter, HBO. “A first-year Comedy Central show is going to pay you less than a first-year network show,” Buress told me. But he said that the network makes good financially if a show “becomes established,” and offers hard-to-rival creative freedoms from the jump: “Comedy Central bought eight episodes from me off a pitch alone. We get to shape the show as we go, and really find it in the writers’ room. That’s exciting and risky, and it’s not common.”

When it comes to working with comedians, Alterman’s approach — and the one he encourages among members of his team — is to frame his notes as questions. He’ll tell you if something doesn’t work, Schumer said, using a coarser term, “but he’s open to the possibility he could be wrong about it.” Alterman says he favors the interrogative because “if you say, ‘Here’s a problem and here’s a solution,’ you’re just building resistance. But it’s quite common to work that way. I’ve seen it in TV and film. It’s so much better to share it as, ‘Here’s a question,’ because if that resonates with them, they’re invested in addressing it in their own voice, and it’s going to work better.” This technique, performed deftly, can function something like a mind trick: “They may come to the same conclusion you did,” Alterman said.

Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of “Broad City” said that Alterman encourages even their most outré creative impulses. “Sometimes the things in a script that we’re most nervous about sending to the network, the things we think are too weird, are the things Kent likes most,” Jacobson said. “He reassures our weirdness.” Glazer cited a moment in the show’s second-season premiere “when my character’s inspecting her vagina in a dressing-room mirror.” The network treated this image to some strategically placed pixelation but allowed Glazer and Jacobson to punch a hole through the fig leaf: “They let us put color in the pixels, to imply pubic hair,” Glazer said.