GENRE REPORT
TV DRAMA
SEBASTIAN CARDWELL, DEPUTY CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER UK, PARAMOUNT
What do you need for Paramount+? Paramount is all about shows people might pay to watch. For the UK, the strategy is broken into two. There’s the broader, wider, thriller strategy, where there’s an insatiable appetite in the UK. Presently it’s more IP related, based on best-selling books. The Ex Wife, our first one, has done incredibly well, we’ve got Killing Kind coming soon, from Eleventh Hour. Then there’s the narrower, more genre specific strategy. Burning Girls from Buccaneer, The Doll Factory…. We’re looking for pockets of viewers who will pay to watch gangsters, supernatural, horror, in cinema, but will they watch it on TV?
that and try that out is brilliant.” If Killing Eve was pitched to ITV head of drama Polly Hill now, she says, she’d be able to reconsider. Broadcasters are building their in-house drama
production capacity - Sky Studios, BBC Studios, ITV Studios are all investing. Polly Hill is at pains to say that she’s open to all-comers. “ITV has some amazing indies in it,” she says, “but equally we work with amazing producers outside.” She points to major shows Trigger Point, from HTM and The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe from Story Films. HTM is led by Jed Mercurio and joint-owned
by Hat Trick; Story Films is part of All3Media. It’s a brave producer who will go it alone in 2022, without the shelter of group investment, or above- the-title leadership. Tom Winchester, former president of Heyday,
launched Pure Fiction earlier this year. He prizes his autonomy, but has minority investment from See- Saw which provides business affairs and production support. “It’s great to be financially independent, but also have that muscle,” says Winchester. Pure Fiction also has minority investment from
talent agency Hamilton Hodell. “All Christian [Hodell’s] clients have hopes and dreams of their own and have their own passions and passion projects. What I want to be is a place for them for when they have those moments in between, to say
“THE REAL SUCCESSES COME OUT OF THAT RISK TAKING SO IT’LL BE INTERESTING TO SEE IF THAT WILL BE SUSTAINED”
What are you looking for on Channel 5? We have three or four buckets of content. Four-part thrillers, zeitgeisty, like Cold Call, or The Teacher, playing on things you see in a newspaper all the time. Under that banner, thriller adaptations, twisty-turny, WHSmith bestseller titles that grab you in, like The Catch, by TM Logan. Romance, the hardest but most rewarding in terms of viewership. I’d like to see more pitched in. Then soft, mystery shows, the Madame Blanc Mysteries, kind of Death in Paradise, used to be shoulder peak, Saturday night. We have the Good Ship Murder, our cruise ship murder mystery. Another, set on a canal barge, with a retired detective and her cat; wherever she moors her boat she solves a murder. There’s more opportunity for character-led for a broad, heartland audience. All Creatures Great and Small, Call the Midwife. We’re looking for more of these, we’ve got an amazing Downton Abbey-esque show for end of next year. Also, two-hour detective shows, like Dalgleish. We’d like to develop a roster of detectives. The other thing is how do we launch a six-part show, not period, not soft, more akin to a big procedural mystery show? How do you reinvent The Missing, Broadchurch, with our smaller budgets?
Winter 2022
televisual.com 49
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