After a long and painful downturn, there is talk of green shoots of recovery in the TV drama market, say scripted execs.
For many people working in the drama production market, one of the most common refrains of the year has been “survive ’til 2025”. Amid a downturn in TV advertising, strike disruption, soaring inflation and a spending slowdown by global streamers, the drama production community has grappled with the abrupt end of the ‘peak TV’ era. A number of drama production companies have closed or downsized, multiple suppliers have gone to the wall and many in the industry have endured a prolonged work drought, lost jobs or have left TV altogether.
Channel 4 chief executive Alex Mahon, speaking last month at the Royal Television Society (RTS) conference in London, acknowledged 2023 was “horrendous for indies and this year hasn’t been much better”. Even Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, whose platform was judged to have “won the streaming wars” in a recent Financial Times article, alluded to “a lot of anxiety in our industry right now” at the same RTS event.
“There is concern about falling investment, there’s the threat from AI and there’s competition from platforms like YouTube and TikTok,” said Sarandos.
Well, 2025 is now just a few months away. Are things really going to get better next year? Is it possible to talk about the green shoots of recovery? “Totally,” said Mahon at the RTS London event, while careful to qualify her reply: “I don’t think we’ll get back to the boom times of previous years of untrammelled, uncontrolled spending.”
Her point is echoed by several industry executives that Screen International interviewed ahead of the Mipcom international programme market in Cannes, which takes place from October 21-24. Cathy Payne, chief executive of Banijay Rights, says the industry is still working through a difficult period, citing the streamer correction and industry consolidation such as Skydance’s merger with Paramount. Pre-sales and financing remain challenging as a result.
“Many of the buyers, especially in the US, which had been underpinning some of the larger-budget scripted series, just aren’t there at the moment,” says Payne, who believes things have improved over the course of the year but notes that buyers are definitely more cautious.
“People are likely to be more risk-averse and go for something that is tried and tested,” she continues, pointing to multi-season renewals for shows such as Call The Midwife, a Neal Street production for the BBC, and Death In Paradise, a Red Planet production also made for the BBC. In a similar vein, key titles on Banijay Rights’ sales slate going into Mipcom are the second seasons of Wolf Hall, SAS Rogue Heroes and Marie Antoinette.
Buyers are also after perennially popular genres such as crime or projects based on well-known IP. Banijay Rights, for example, is also selling UKTV Play’s ‘reimagined’ update of crime drama Bergerac, which ran for nine series on the BBC in the 1980s.
Safe bets
Meanwhile, procedurals — cop, medical and legal shows — which have long been the cornerstone of network dramas are increasingly popular with cost-conscious streamers as well. For example, Max has ordered 15-episode medical drama The Pitt from the team behind ER. In a recent interview, Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content, said The Pitt is a “good template” for a Max drama “which is, for lack of a better word, network drama, ongoing, close-end storytelling done at a price that’s reasonable.”
It is telling that crime dramas as well as series renewals feature strongly on the upcoming production slate of New York and London-based Playground Entertainment, which currently has an impressive seven series on the go. They include Wolf Hall: The Mirror And The Light and the fifth season of rebooted vet drama All Creatures Great And Small. Crime series are headed by an adaptation of Georges Simenon’s classic Inspector Maigret novels and Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley mysteries. Playground is also making period piece The Hardacres and comedy drama Small Town, Big Story, directed by Chris O’Dowd.
David Stern, co-managing director of Playground, says the company has been “focused and disciplined” on the projects it has developed. “We have kept a real eye on the creative and whether they will work in the marketplace — and whether we can produce them knowing the financial constraints in the marketplace right now,” he says.
Playground co-managing director Scott Huff says the company has regular conversations with distributors about the “perennial” kinds of shows that travel. “What travels? Procedural crime, thrillers and high-concept dramas. Then there are the wonderful outliers, and we’ve developed things we love that we think will be wonderful outliers as well.”
An example of the latter is Playground’s Small Town, Big Story, a Sky original starring Christina Hendricks and Paddy Considine, about the impact of a Hollywood production rolling into a rural village on the Irish border. “It’s the kind of show that broadcasters are not making 10 a year of anymore, but they do still need to find things that can catch a more specific audience and then break out,” says Stern.
Certainly, many believe passionately that the market needs to back original, risky projects as much as it does safer genres. Witness the whoops and cheers for Richard Gadd during one of his Primetime Emmy Award acceptance speeches last month for Baby Reindeer: “I know the industry is in a slump right now… but I do believe no slump was ever broken without willingness to take risks,” said Gadd. “If Baby Reindeer has proved anything, it’s that there’s no set formula to this — that you don’t need big stars, proven IP, long-running series, catch-all storytelling to have a hit.”
Both Playground’s Stern and Huff say they are optimistic about the outlook for scripted TV. “Any market is going to have its ups and downs, but there are still a lot of people clamouring for great drama throughout the world,” says Stern. “That is not going to change whether there are 500 scripted shows or 400 scripted shows getting made — there’s obviously going to be ebbs and flows.
“In many ways, it’s about price points,” he continues. “And some places are probably not taking the riskier bets on certain types of shows. But the need for streamers all the way to linear broadcasters to fill those pipelines is always going to be there.”
European stability
This optimistic mood is shared by Pascal Breton, CEO and co-founder of Paris-based production, financing and distribution group Federation, which has 25 labels in Europe, the UK and the US with credits including The Bureau. Its Mipcom slate features the upcoming Sherlock & Daughter, crime drama Curfew, period drama Miss Austen and thriller I, Jack Wright. Breton says the drama commissioning and acquisition market is currently “stable” in Europe, but is more challenging in the US.
The European free TV and pay-TV market, he says, is “not growing but is not slowing down. The reality is that free TV needs their primetime dramas. But they can’t buy American dramas because they’re not on the networks anymore — the Germans and Italians are buying more French shows. And the French free-TV broadcasters are buying more European shows because they don’t have enough French ones.”
On the commissioning side, Breton says the streamers are back in Europe after a two-year slowdown: “Netflix says they don’t have enough shows in France and want to commission more, but it’s difficult to find good projects and it takes time to develop them.” He reckons the same goes for Canal+.
Breton also thinks EU investment obligations on US streamers, which mandate that platforms must spend a certain percentage of their revenues on European content, are having an impact “especially in France but also in Italy and soon in Germany”.
The US market remains difficult, partly because of ongoing consolidation and restructuring as well as the expense of drama production. “The cost is about three times more expensive [in the US],” says Breton. “If you fail on a show, you lose a lot of money.”
The big challenge, he adds, is affordability of dramas. “Broadcasters can’t afford to be alone on a show. They can’t pay 70% of a show’s budget, with the rest coming from subsidies. They’d rather pay 50% or 60%. Then it becomes difficult to finance, and we need to find another broadcaster.”
Hence the growing number of co-productions in Europe. “The co-production model is back,” says Breton. He cites Federation’s upcoming adaptation of cult comic novel Lucky Luke, a co-pro between France Télévisions and Disney. Federation is also developing a show on the Tour de France cycle race. “I have France Télévisions, I hope to have Germany, and I have strong interest from one or two streamers,” he says.
Big bets are still being taken, of course. One of the major titles at Mipcom this year is MGM+’s adaptation of George R Stewart’s post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides, about the last survivors on Earth after a virulent plague. Todd Komarnicki, showrunner for Earth Abides, whose feature credits include Sully and Elf, says: “The great stuff is getting made. The shows that matter to people and feel like they can be a big win in the marketplace, and culturally.”
He jokes that the days when every phone call to Netflix resulted in a greenlight have passed, though. “Who knows if they will return again?”
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