Lisa Berger & Sarah Penna’s Frolic Media Inks First-Look Deal With CBS TV Studios

EXCLUSIVE: Frolic Media, an entertainment media company co-founded by former E! President Lisa Berger and former AwesomenessTV executive Sarah Penna, has signed a first-look deal with CBS Television Studios. Additionally, the company, devoted to all things romance, has hired former Dynamic Television exec Elena Blekhter as head of TV and Film. Blekhter was Director of Scripted Content at Dynamic, where she developed and served as co-executive producer on the upcoming Netflix series Ginny & Georgia. 

Under the pact, Frolic will develop female-focused  content for broadcast and streamers.

Frolic Media, a media company and website that has built a community of authors, bloggers, bookstagrammers and storytellers in the romance space, is headed by Berger, a veteran traditional media executive, and Penna, an experienced digital media entrepreneur who recently sold her last company, BigFrame, to DreamWorks.

Formed in 2018, Los Angeles-based Frolic caters to the $1 billion dollar Romance industry in the U.S. alone, targeting the younger segment of romance fans, 25- to 39-year-olds. In 2019 Frolic launched a Romance-centric podcast network. Its community has grown to over 100,000 across platforms and 10 million in its influencer network. The company is repped by UTA.

Berger previously did a nine-year stint as President of E! where she shepherded such hit unscripted series as The Girls Next Door, Keeping Up With The Kardashians and its offshoots and late-night program Chelsea Lately. Before E!, she was a creative executive at Fox Television Studios and MTV. Prior to setting up Frolic, she served as Strategic Creative Consultant at AwesomenessTV, where she met Penna, and before that, spent a year as EVP Alternative Series, Specials and Late-Night at ABC.