Weekly: How the rules of celebrity-led factual are changing

It has been fashionable to roll your eyes at celebrity-led factual, but it has a unique superpower: a way to get giant audiences to embrace complex subjects.

Now big stars are giving us more of themselves than ever before, it’s raising the ceiling for what premium factual can do.

Our most recent celebrity-led series, Pole to Pole with Will Smith on Disney+, follows Will on a 100-day, 26,000-mile journey across the planet. It was a huge commitment for a Hollywood star, but also for someone who’d never spent a night under canvas and hates bugs and snakes.

Sure enough, it was no luxury tour - he scales ice walls during snowstorms, hunts giant anacondas in the Amazon, milks tarantulas in caves and gets trapped beneath the North Pole ice.

But the series landed not just for the spectacle, but because of what it lets viewers experience with him: curiosity, vulnerability, humour, awe, fear, and ultimately, transformation.

Combining genres

In British terms, the show’s an odd mix: a global megastar telling dad jokes and dancing into a polar research station one minute, then discussing the inner workings of atmospheric rivers the next.

‘Serious science’ and ‘fun celebrity’ are normally treated as two different audiences with little crossover. In the US, cable did something similar, carving audiences into genre lanes. True crime skewed tabloid, female; history skewed older, male, red state. But then streaming happened and shows like Making a Murderer and Don’t F**k With Cats catapulted genres out of their niches.

Break the old category rules and the results might surprise you.

Far from selling out on science, we found the opposite: adding someone people already care about lets you open it up to the world. The mix doesn’t dilute the serious stuff, it gives you cover to go there. You can sit with polar scientists explaining how ice sheets archive the past, or why Antarctica is drier than the Sahara – stuff normally reserved for shows you have to search for (or try to avoid).

Add humour and adventure - and a star who’s genuinely amazed by it all - and it becomes properly enjoyable. The science stays rigorous, it’s just not the only thing going on. By switching the audience proposition from factual to entertainment, a series packed with BBC Four-grade science can become the most-watched across the entire Disney+ platform.

“Social media has rewired our relationship with celebrity - audiences have got used to intimacy and transparency, so TV has had to keep pace”

But it’s not just about ratings. In our most recent collaboration with Chris Hemsworth, Road Trip to Remember, he embarks on a physical and emotional journey with his father in which he confronts, for the first time, his father’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Underpinning the show is the groundbreaking work of dementia researcher Suraj Samtani. Despite the prevalence of the disease and the impact of Suraj’s ‘reminiscence therapy’ in reducing symptoms, unless you read science journals, you’ll never have heard of it.

Chris’ willingness to share his experience carried that information to millions of people all over the world. It broke beyond the genre - my Colombian mother-in-law has watched it three times (three more times than any of my other shows).

And it’s touched lives in very real ways. Mates I grew up playing football with - who all think I’ve basically joined the circus - told me about big conversations it sparked with their dads. Chris himself calls it’s one of the most important things he’s ever made.

And when a star cares about a show, they talk about it. No factual marketing budget on Earth can compete with an engaged megastar. Will’s social posts about Pole to Pole have reached over 250 million people. Chris recently spent precious minutes on Graham Norton while promoting his new movie (in sofa slot number one, no less) sharing the story of returning to his childhood home in our show, perfectly restored to its 1990s glory by the production team, and its impact on his father.

Evolutionary momentum

Of course, it’s not always been like this. The genre has transformed in the last 15 years. In Nutopia’s first ever show - a 12-part history of America for the History Channel - Jane Root’s radical idea was to pair eminent historians alongside iconic Americans as interviewees. Think Meryl Streep and Michael Douglas (and Barack Obama and Donald Trump) talking about what mattered to them about the American experience.

I’ll never forget a conversation with a top BBC exec at the time who ridiculed the whole endeavour. The show covered all the big, important and historically complex stuff too, but it was the interviews that catapulted it to a whole new level of audience. It became the network’s highest-ever rated special at the time and prompted a national conversation about what it means to be American.

Since then, social media has rewired our relationship with celebrity. Audiences have got used to intimacy and transparency, so television has had to keep pace. This new frontier is total access and authorship – a star who’s properly in it and not just the poster.

The result is a new level of reach and a whole new category of difficulty. As our execs Peter Lovering, Tom Williams and Arif Nurmohamed will testify, you might be wrestling anacondas and minus 38c but the hard bit is the diary. You’re not just fighting for a slot in someone’s schedule, you’re competing with Bad Boys for Will Smith’s time. Or with insurers who weigh up your latest stunt idea against the value of the Thor franchise.

These are incredible people, but also billion-dollar businesses.

As stars become more involved in the development and production process, strong partnerships with their teams become crucial to making the impossible happen. This can mean near-daily conversations with our friends at Westbrook, Wild State and Protozoa. Or with the brilliant executives at Nat Geo - Courteney Monroe, Tom Mcdonald, Bengt Anderson and many others. No one thought that a once-small cable channel could achieve some of the things they have.

Although not every platform can afford a Will or a Chris, the lessons still apply: when you stop putting genres and audiences into buckets, and find the right mix of entertainment and expertise, a celebrity partnership can catapult specialist subjects into the serious mainstream.

Pole to Pole With Will Smith is now streaming on Disney+