Weekly: Shining a light on UK drama’s future

Predicting what’s in store for the global drama industry over the next few years is almost as tricky as navigating it in the recent past.

But for those looking to build scripted series out of the UK, there’s probably one certainty: international partners will be a necessary keystone.

While a Netflix or Apple TV+ global commission may provide a silver bullet to the budgets of a smattering of producers, the vast majority of shows need multiple partners of all flavours to get off the ground.

Without them, scripted series – even those that have got the greenlight from broadcasters such as the BBC – remain on hiatus as producers attempt to fill deficits. Fremantle’s chief exec of commercial and international, Jens Richter, recently told Broadcast International that between 15 and 20 such projects are “floating around” in the UK alone.

This is what the much-discussed industry recalibration over the past 18 months looks like in real life. If your series costs more than £2m per episode, good luck. Yet this realisation also means the cogs of the sector have been able to start turning again.

“It feels like we’re coming out of what has been the darkest days to a period now where everybody is willing to find solutions,” says Richard Tulk-Hart, co-chief exec at Buccaneer Media. “That’s probably the best way of putting it.”

Tulk-Hart and the Buccaneer team know a thing or two about producing scripted series to a budget. Marcella put the company on the global map almost a decade ago following a deal that saw the ITV show being taken worldwide via Netflix, while Whitstable Pearl and 2023 duo The Burning Girls and The Doll Factory took the company’s output onto Paramount+.

The latter was subsequently pulled after its debut as Paramount looked to cut costs and is now available on Netflix, such are the whims of the global streaming business.

Yet production companies, particularly those of a scripted persuasion, cannot flit between strategies quite so quickly.

While the US streamers have spent the past 36 months attempting to keep Wall Street happy by correcting their respective courses, Buccaneer has been busy navigating a changing ecosystem. So Long, Marianne made it onto screens around the world via upwards of a half dozen partners, while a greenlight was snagged for The Crow Girl from Paramount+ UK, and In Flight is in the works with the UK’s Channel 4.

Life without the US

The slate has largely been achieved without US partners and Tulk-Hart holds little hope that Stateside buying activity will pick up anytime soon.

“The industry is waking up but the US is still not sure where and how to do things. Decision-making has definitely moved back to the States in a large way but the decision-making is not resulting in lots of commissions.

“That means that as a UK-based production company, you have to be thinking in terms of how do I set this show up without the US. Doing that means you can then dangle that bit in front of the distributor, so at least they’ve got the US to be able to sell.”

Tulk-Hart says he has found that the “more specialised” streamers – the Acorn TVs and BritBoxs of the world – are the most active, while networks are trying to navigate a fast-changing world.

“When it comes to the streamers, I think there’s a quandary at the moment with producers wondering if it’s the US that’s making decisions or the UK? Saying that, we’re in development with one of them and budgets are very healthy when you do get into the conversation and you find the right piece. But the days of lots of opportunities have gone.”

And the Buccaneer exec is definitive on whether the peak TV era will ever return.

“No, it won’t. We talk about corrections – by definition, they’re necessary and they’re correcting something that is wrong. There was too much being made.

“It was halcyon days and that was great, while it lasted, but the new world order is going to be around producers and production companies willing to work with others and have other voices in the room. And there won’t be as much being commissioned as there was before because there isn’t the necessity for it.”

Pieces of the puzzle

There is, however, demand for scripted series that can be produced for £2m and also cut through. IP obviously helps, and The Crow Girl ticked the boxes, while Eve Myles, Katherine Kelly and Dougray Scott in lead roles pushed the envelope with distributor ITV Studios.

“We’ve made a few shows for Paramount+ [UK and Ireland] so that piece of the puzzle was fairly straightforward,” Tulk-Hart says of the lead commissioner. “They really liked the IP, it’s based on Erik Axl Sund’s Crow Girl series and was based on three books released in the UK – and in the US as one gigantic book – so hopefully we’re going to make it to three seasons.”

Reviews have been positive and Tulk-Hart suggests it has performed better than any other show that Paramount+ has had out of the UK. “It’s under £2m per episode and making shows under that number is key if you’re talking about a patchwork of buyers,” he says, with The Crow Girl picked up by buyers including Australia’s Seven Network.

Other projects that underline the nature of scripted business right now is the appropriately named In Flight, which was picked up by Polly Scates’ acquisitions team at Channel 4. It has just wrapped filming, Tulk-Hart says, with ProSiebenSat.1 in Germany, SBS in Australia and TNVZ in New Zealand pre-buying the series.

The Buccaneer boss, who runs the company with co-chief exec Tony Wood, offers “a big thank you” to companies such as SBS and TVNZ.

“They’re really open to having these conversations and want to join with their counterparts in Europe to be a part of shows where they’re not paying acquisition fees, they’re paying the middle range between an acquisition and the commission. That’s allowing for these shows to get made.”

Deal-making & partnering up

Rights and relationships also play a key role. On the former, Paramount+ has become far more flexible, with Prime Video also “definitely up for doing similar deals,” Tulk-Hart says.

“I think if you’re talking about Netflix or Apple TV+, where they are truly worldwide companies, it doesn’t really make sense for them not to have worldwide rights. I sometimes wonder if it’s just a sort of industry chatter that has them saying that they’re open to flexible models as opposed to anything else.”

And even when a broadcaster does come onboard, as C4 has with In Flight, it’s not necessarily a “full-fat commission”, Tulk-Hart says. “That was still very much a case of how do we stitch this one together. Mike Walden (Marcella, Whitstable Pearl) is the writer – and that is relevant.

“When you’re embarking on a show from the beginning with a writer, if you can scale it up and scale it down, depending on what budget you end up on, that can be a really important consideration. In Flight could cost £10m an episode – but it doesn’t.”

“We had C4, then it was SBS and TVNZ, ProSiebenSat.1, Fremantle. And then we had help from Northern Island Screen who have been amazing, the help they provided us with and the crew that we’ve got is extraordinary.

“That’s working to a tight budget under £2m, with Katherine Kelly and Stuart Martin, who is being touted as the next James Bond. I mean, that’s helpful.”

Tulk-Hart adds that Buccaneer chose an indie filmmaker director in Chris Baugh for the show. “There are so many different facets to this industry and so many different people. The reality is that some know how to make shows in this [price] range and some don’t.

“And that has got to go right the way through the production - in our director, in our line producer, our producer on In Flight, they knew from the beginning that this had a certain amount of money but they were really ambitious people in terms of we’ve got to squeeze every inch of creativity out of this budget.

”I’m bound to say this because it’s a Buccaneer show, but it looks like it cost far more than the budget that we had for it. And hats off to the team for being able to do that.”

Relationships of all manners form another key plank of the strategy. Buccaneer is able to be flexible because it is owned by Cineflix Media – parent of distributor Cineflix Rights, which sold its So Long, Marianne series. But the company is also able to pick its partners depending on projects, so Fremantle is selling In Flight.

And then there is the trust factor. Commissioners are, as any producer will tell you, under huge pressure to focus on ROI and Buccaneer’s experience in the business can help assuage fears.

“I have a long-standing relationship with Seb [Cardwell] at Paramount+. We go back a long, long way, we’ve made shows in the UK just for the UK, and then with The Burning Girls we had a worldwide play, and now we’re speaking to them as Paramount+ UK, as Paramount+ worldwide and as CBS Studios. We’re in development on various things.

“At the end of the day, commissioners are our paymasters and it’s not just about making a good show - at the moment, they are having to justify what they’re doing more than they’ve ever had to.

“So, IP is clearly a big thing and if a book has been successful or a computer game or whatever it is, well, that makes their job internally far easier and equally they can point to the fact that it was a very successful book, so it makes sense to try and do this or that.”

Befitting of an industry that tends to shift strategies quickly, Buccaneer currently has an array of projects in the works using various models and partners. But as UK-based producers know all too well, the scripted industry is very much a global business that is frequently buffeted by forces beyond anything within the control of the domestic market.

UK decision time?

“As an industry, we’re about to be forced to make a decision,” Tulk-Hart continues, pointing to the travails facing the US, where scripted production costs remain stubbornly high.

“It’s so much more expensive to make a show there, as we know. I don’t think there’s an incredible amount of waste but it’s so much cheaper here and what we have that they don’t is the tax credit system.”

His concern is that US producers will look to bring their shows to the UK with budgets that, while lower than the States, will still have an inflationary effect on the UK sector.

“Those US shows coming in are going to be more expensive, there’s no doubt. We can make them for less here, but they’re still going to be £4m per episode instead of £2m, and that’s basically going to put us through what we’ve just experienced, which is inflation in the production space. And that is going to only do a disservice to UK shows.”

The balance is a tricky one, he concedes. “If I’m phoned by somebody in the US asking us to make a show for them, in a tough market, it’s going to be hard to say no.”

It is, he adds, a balance, and a situation in which the government should offer assistance. “I don’t think it should be left to us to work it out or just Pact – there are a lot of very tricky conversations to be had, but it’s about longevity. This is an industry, whether it’s your personal relationships or your relationships with broadcasters, where longevity is key and decisions need to be made for the longer term, not the short term for selfish reasons.”

With a development slate in place and commissions under their belts, Buccaneer is in many ways in an enviable position among UK-based drama producers. But what is the outlook like for the sector as a whole in the near and longer term?

“In a year’s time, I don’t think we’re going to be in a particularly different space where we are now. It’s going to be about who survived rather than thrived. It has been a batten down the hatches moment. You need to get a couple of things away, maintain relationships, and you’ve got to stay to the core of what your beliefs were before.

“What happens in five years is a more interesting thought – then, I think we’ll be in a completely different world. That world may be more settled, but I think it will look very different to what it does today and who is relevant in five years will be very different to who is relevant now.”