Weekly: Adapting to a new scripted calling

The international co-production conundrum is particularly acute for UK producers because projects are routinely “falling between two stools” of budget and scale, according to the co-chief exec of The Night Manager studio Fifth Season.

Chris Rice says the “middle ground” of dramas, which he pegs as costing around £4m and requiring a seven-figure deficit from a distributor, have largely disappeared, leaving producers to decide whether projects are “elevated or shrunk” to secure budget from one (or more) commissioners and other funding players.

“The stuff in the middle is what’s suffering: the kind of £4m UK-commissioned show that has a £2m deficit and no recognisable acting talent,” he says. “No distributor is funding that deficit.”

Co-commission considerations

Along with his partner Graham Taylor, Rice has led CJ ENM-owned Fifth Season from its inception as Endeavor Content in 2017 and has helped the company build, package and arrange a cadre of high-profile co-productions – predominantly between the UK and the US markets.

The list ranges from spy thrillers such as The Night Manager for AMC Networks and BBC1, to Killing Eve for AMC-owned BBC America, with the slate also including HBO/BBC1 fantasy smash His Dark Materials, Foxtel/BBC2’s Top Of The Lake: China Girl, Sky/AMC Networks’ A Discovery of Witches and BBC1/Hulu’s Normal People.

He says the UK-US co-commissioning model was his “core business from 2014 to 2018”, benefitting from a “chunky licence fee” from a US broadcaster that would match or exceed the UK partner.

It represented a time when drama was packaged carefully for both markets, he says, and although shows from that period were “inherently British” - because of the IP, the producers, the writing talent and the on-screen talent - they all catered for the US partners’ needs.

Amid recent industry chatter that UK drama is facing a funding crisis amid a dearth of US co-pros – which Rice takes to mean as a ‘co-commission’ – he observes a contributing problem: some British producers with drama projects eyeing a US partner do not have proper consideration for what works in the American market.

“Distributors began thinking of US deals like a territory sale, rather than a co-commission that needed to be strategised over”

“When we did projects like Night Manager, they were very carefully constructed. We put as much thought into the US side of the co-commission,” he says. “Strategically, when you’re building a project, a lot of British producers spend an inordinate amount of time thinking how they are going to get the BBC to greenlight their show.

“For those projects, you need to spend as much time thinking about how you are going to get your US co-commissioning partner to do that.

”And the US market and the UK market care about slightly different things – the US cares much more around a certain level of casting and packaging and talent than the UK. It’s not that the UK market doesn’t care about talent, it’s just a bit different.”

He continues: “And as the [production] market got more and more used to that [way of thinking], there was probably less and less thought put into the other side of the co-commission.

“At that point, it didn’t matter because the US market was expanding so fast, everything was about volume, and those co-commissions represented very small bets relative to other shows coming out of the US – it was a $2m licence fee instead of a $6m licence against an American-created show.

“I think that it became easy enough that, probably, distributors were thinking of it like a territory sale, rather than a co-commission that needed to be strategised over and requiring a certain set of tools.”

In today’s landscape, as US buyers focus on “US-centric” shows, the bar to get an international deal has been elevated. Whereas there might have been 10 big UK-US co-commissions three years ago, he senses there now might be around three.

“Those middle [budget] UK drama projects [that aren’t getting Stateside partners] weren’t built or packaged carefully enough for the US market,” he emphasises.

“So, either those projects need to be thought about better, their development for that market, or they need to elevated or shrunk. Otherwise, they’re falling between the two stools of something that’s big and global and packaged with stars and therefore marketable, or a great piece of British telly.”

Rice notes that the forthcoming second series of The Night Manager – co-commissioned by the BBC and Amazon Prime Video last year – took Fifth Season between two and three years to negotiate.

He is quick to note that he doesn’t think the drama world will be completely polarised and the middle will disappear, observing that “too many people talk in absolutes” in the industry.

“The middle is the tough spot, but there will be places where things like that make great sense.”

Shifting the Stateside focus

One strategy that Fifth Season is employing more readily nowadays is not looking immediately to the US as a partner to get a show of the ground.

Killing Eve-esque espionage series Honey is a BBC-ZDF project, and those two broadcasters have cemented their relationship with a drama co-commissioning pact.

“There are other ways to build co-commissions and co-productions that might live more in that middle set of budgets,” he says. “Like anything, it’s about being intentional and thoughtful about what one is trying to build. Producers are very intentional and thoughtful about developing a show because it’s something that network X in my territory will want.

“That same market understanding, intentionality and thoughtfulness needs to go into a co- commission. And that can come through people spending lots of time understanding both the markets they are trying to operate in or it can come down to a partnership that has to happen.”

Fifth Season retains a US-focused slate that includes Apple TV+ smash Severance but a UK slate is also being worked up by former BBC drama commissioner Ben Irving, with “genuine” co-productions between the two countries.

“The US studio has, I’ll tell you the real number, somewhere between a dozen and 20 projects that are being co-produced with a British production company,” he says.

“Ben Irving’s slate is a mix of projects he’s developed himself, and projects that British producers have brought to him to co-produce because of our expertise in packaging and because they are probably projects that are bigger in scope and which you might want to sell into the US in co-production with the UK.

“There are some people who have big businesses who believe that sharing enables them to do more, and we’re that too. We’re not thinking: in everything that we do, we should have 100%. We have always valued collaboration and partnership and our whole business has been built around it.”

Money where your mouth is

Besides reiterating the industry-wide call for enhanced tax credits, particularly in the UK, Rice also urges broadcasters to offer “bigger licence fees” because he says they have the resources to do so.

“We’ve started to witness that when terrestrial networks in the UK want something and they think it’s important, there’s some stretchiness [in budget] there. That is exactly what they should be doing,” he says.

“This idea that a licence fee is a licence fee no matter whether something is a £1m show or a £10m show just doesn’t make much sense to me.”