Series Mania 2024 preview: how the global TV sector is facing up to drama slowdown and rise of AI

French event Series Mania is adapting to a new audio­visual landscape after a year that saw the global TV industry shaken by strikes, slowing content spend and international conflicts.

The Lille-based scripted TV festival has become an essential stop on the international circuit, particularly its industry-focused Forum, a three-day marathon of meetings, screenings, panels and conferences. TV executives — whether they be buyers, commissioners, distributors, producers, writers, institutions or agents — flock to the city in search of new projects and fresh talent. Major studios and streamers capitalise on the event to tease upcoming slates for global buyers and press, and also lure local producers to future projects.

While other TV-focused events such as the London TV Screenings, LA Screenings and Mipcom are geared towards buying and selling, Series Mania plays a different role. The event’s founder and general director Laurence Herszberg says that as the audiovisual industry continues to change, “everyone in this industry is asking questions, so they want to meet with other decision-­makers, they need to see what’s happening in the rest of the world and observe trends.”

Francesco Capurro, director of Series Mania’s Forum, tells Screen International this year’s event will be “more global, with more delegations from far across the world”, including from South Korea, Taiwan, a first-time Africa pavilion and “more and more stands”. There will be a new buyers’ lounge as the event is expected to welcome even more buyers this year. “We’re growing in numbers, but we are trying not to lose our soul,” Capurro insists.

Dominique Farrugia, managing director of Banijay’s Shine Fiction, describes Series Mania as “a hub to gauge the pulse of scripted content from around the world, and understand the current market a little better.” The Forum, he says, “is unique, as all conversations specifically revolve about series from morning to night,” adding that the event is “a place to meet writers, producers and broadcasters from across Europe and beyond”.

Tightening market

Series Mania, now in its 25th year, itself may be growing, but it recognises the scripted TV industry is slowing down as studios and streamers put the brakes on incessant greenlighting. The festival received fewer series entries this year for its main programme, according to Herszberg.

“But I’m not worried for Series Mania,” she says. “It just confirms movement in the industry. There’s been a tightening. Streamers are investing less, things are taking longer. There is less of a frenzy of production that was tiring even audiences.” However, she insists there is still a large content pool to explore. “We did receive 368 series — no need to panic.”

While still aspirational, the general mood of the industry and the Forum this year will indeed be more pragmatic. “We’ve all come back down to earth,” says Berlin-based Israeli producer Danna Stern, who sits on Series Mania’s International Panorama jury. “The international TV market today is more about quality over quantity, franchisable versus standalone or short-running. The retention of existing subscribers is as important as the chase for new subscribers, focusing on actual revenues and profits versus a fairy-tale story of the infinite possibility of endless subscribers.”

Early approval

Series Mania’s founding premise was as a place ‘Where series begin’. And that is truer than ever today, Capurro notes. “Buyers are looking for series more and more in early stages.”

Key to the Forum is its Co-Pro Pitching Sessions, which showcases 16 series seeking international funding. Fifteen of these vie for a $54,000 (€50,000) prize to contribute to development — the 16th series, spy thriller Witness 36, won the Series Mania award at Berlin’s Co-Pro Series event, so is not included in the competition but will be pitched. The Forum also stages multiple other pitching events, such as the Red Sea Series Lab and presentations of series projects by writer/producer duos from Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film & Tele­vision School.

The co-production pitching sessions have been a catalyst for several series, including France’s No Man’s Land, the UK’s Keeping Faith and Denmark’s Warrior, while other series were born more organically at the event. For example, French author Pierre Lemaitre and Clovis Cornillac were members of Series Mania’s Competition jury in 2018, and Cornillac ended up directing 2022’s The Colors Of Fire, a film based on Lemaitre’s best­selling novel. Herszberg reveals that France-­Israeli series Possessions was born in a hallway at Series Mania when the show’s creator Shachar Magen ran into Haut et Court’s Caroline Benjo and said simply, “‘I have a project. Natalie kills her husband on their wedding night,’ and the series was born.”

Stéphanie Bro, longtime Studiocanal and Sony Pictures Television executive and founder of L’Agence Inédite, explains that Series Mania is “an event that propels projects particularly in the early stages of development and helps them to launch marketing strategies and find financing or partners. It’s a place of connection.”

New for this year is the Forum’s IP Market, which will focus on literary adaptations, podcasts and short formats. “We are in a market that is tightening its belt and producing less, so series creators at every level of the industry need to be sure about what they are producing,” says Herszberg. At such an unpredictable time, “the industry is looking for more reassuring content.” She points out that most series that proved the biggest success stories in France this year were based on intellectual property (IP), citing Samber, Of Money And Blood and Tapie.

Drive for intellectual property

At Series Mania’s festival, IP will be front and centre. Mediawan, for example, will be showcasing its upcoming IP-based miniseries The Count Of Monte-Cristo, directed by Danish director Bille August and starring Sam Claflin. Norway’s NRK brings So Long, Marianne, about the tumultuous relationship between musician Leonard Cohen and Norwegian writer Marianne Ihlen.

Another central theme of this year’s festival and forum is artificial intelligence (AI), a hot industry topic and driving force of the strikes in Hollywood. “The market wants to assure itself with IPs,” Herszberg says, “but at the same time, there is this exciting new AI-fuelled tech­nology than can help facilitate the writing and creation of series.”

The festival opens with Netflix sci-fi series 3 Body Problem, which features AI capable of transporting its characters into alternative space­times to solve geopolitical issues rooted in the past. Yan England’s series Rematch, from Arte France and Unité with Federation Studios, is a psychological thriller about the 1997 battle between world chess champion Garry Kasparov and IBM’s supercomputer, a subject with equal resonance today.

The festival will end with the sixth edition of its Lille Dialogues, a day-long international summit under the theme ‘Gen AI, the technology we’d love to like’. It will focus on the impact of AI on the content industry, exploring how AI-­enabled tools can impact creative projects while also addressing issues of remuneration and consent in generative AI.

“A festival isn’t a bubble. We need to come together to talk about these issues, to allow both assuring IP and AI to coexist,” says Herszberg of a middle ground that allows tech­nology to facilitate production while keeping creativity at the helm.

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