A European Television Fiction Renaissance

Premium Production Models and Transnational Circulation

Luca Barra, Massimo Scaglioni, Luca Barra, Massimo Scaglioni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000264340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Télévision

This book maps the landscape of contemporary European premium television fiction, offering a detailed overview of both the changes in the digital production and distribution and the emergence of specific national and transnational case histories.

Combining a media-production approach with a textual and audience analysis, the volume offers a complex, stratified, systemic view of ongoing aesthetic, sociocultural and industrial developments in contemporary European TV. With contributions from leading experts in the field, the book first offers an overview of the industrial, policy and cultural context for the renaissance of European television drama over the past decade, based on original comparative research. This research is then supported by case study chapters from the key contexts within which quality European television is being produced, offering a complex and complete picture of the industry's strengths and limitations, its traditions and trends, its constraints and future perspectives.

A European Television Fiction Renaissance is a must-read book for TV scholars working across Europe and beyond in the areas of media studies, international communications and television studies, media industries studies, production studies, European studies, and media policy studies as well as for those with an interest in television drama, Netflix, globalisation, pay TV and on demand.

1 Introduction

The many steps and factors of a European renaissance

Luca Barra and Massimo Scaglioni

In little over a decade, from 2008 to 2020, television scripted-series production in Europe underwent a succession of major changes, prompting what we term here a European television fiction renaissance.

It all started when the big pay TV operators began producing more and more original series in the main national markets. The aim was to transcend the national boundaries within which the public service broadcasters and commercial networks had traditionally conceived television fiction. Naturally, the role of pay TV, both in the early seminal years and during the decade that followed, must be contextualized within the broader transformations of digitalization and convergence affecting Europe’s media and television arena. Yet – and this is the thesis of this volume, and the hypothesis of the underlying research – it was precisely the emergent “premium model” that profoundly marked the whole period, with major repercussions for the kinds of titles produced and the production and distribution practices involved. At the same time, the supranational success and critical acclaim of the much-discussed, much-studied Nordic noir genre was helping European series made in smaller markets, in contexts where the public service broadcasters had a strong presence, to gain global relevance. What has received less attention, though, despite its enduring ramifications, is the gradual emergence of a high-quality/high-end fiction genre that sprang from local commissioning by numerous pay TV operators, and then became consolidated as the big over-the-top global platforms joined in with their production efforts. These are all the elements that inspired an unprecedented model of premium European TV series.

This process of change came to a halt with the SARS-Cov-2 virus pandemic in the first half of 2020. While the long-term effects of the crisis on scripted-series and, more generally, various media contents remain to be studied and identified, of course, early 2020 has certainly witnessed a radical, abrupt halt in fiction production. Covid-19 has had a major, direct impact on audiovisual production throughout the world, and it is not yet clear whether this watershed moment will mark the end of the European renaissance or the beginning of a further phase of rethinking and reshaping. It could prove a moment of reflection after a period of intense innovation in which the series devised and made for a subscriber audience – often conceived of as a disparate collection of niches across the products’ country of origin and the many other contexts where the title is distributed – have driven the TV industry forward.

Three perspectives for a systemic approach

In the decade (and a bit) considered here, then, an original production/distribution model for premium television fiction has developed, through trial and error, and then become established. The golden age of US network, cable and on-demand series, articulating complex narratives and distinctive visual and writing styles has inspired production companies, pay TVs, and non-linear platforms in major markets and emerging districts across Europe while developing and renewing an industrial production and distribution method (with showrunners instead of screenwriters/ directors and with branding and promotion as key factors, following the US industrial model). They have created abundant fresh scripted fictional content that has enjoyed wide global circulation for the first time, to be sold to international audiovisual markets and watched by large international audiences. This phenomenon is of increasing interest not only to scholars and to professionals but also to television viewers and fans in general, in Europe and further afield – as the ratings, the public discussions, and the critical and professional discourses confirm. The first part of this edited collection, entitled Researching European Fiction, presents the results of an original study. Parts 2–7, by a constellation of renowned European television and media scholars, examine the main European markets: the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Central and Eastern Europe (with specific focus on Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary). The volume thus provides the first-ever mapping of contemporary European premium fiction, illuminating these ongoing aesthetic, sociocultural, and industrial developments through a wide range of original contributions and case histories. The aim is to offer a detailed overview of the changes in the digital production and distribution scenario, along with the emergence of national specificities.

To do so, the collection explores and combines three distinct perspectives. The first is the progressive delineation of a completely transnational television scenario in Europe, with the birth of media conglomerates operating in several linguistic and cultural markets that can invest what it takes to develop, produce, and distribute high-concept, high-budget TV series. The analysis focuses on large European or national and transnational conglomerates (Sky Europe, Canal+, Movistar+), on US players entering the European market with original co-productions (HBO Europe, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video), and on independent transnational production companies (like the mega-indies Fremantle or Endemol and their subsidiaries, or some dynamic national players whose production success makes them a target in increasingly intense new conglomerative processes: the Italian company Cattleya, for example, was recently acquired by United Kingdom’s ITV Studios).

The second level regards the development over time, through various experiments, of an original model for producing, distributing, promoting, and programming premium television fiction, with several common traits (partially original and unique, partially adapted from the US television arena), which are then tailored to the different markets’ languages and cultural specificities. The analysis explores how the pay broadcasters and platforms often began within their comfort zone with smaller texts (as miniseries and adaptations), before investing in more ambitious projects with global audience appeal involving numerous episodes and seasons.

Together with the industrial and (relatively recent) historical aspects, the third level of analysis looks at the creation of particular aesthetics and formats. Some specificities apply on account of individual companies’ editorial guidelines, but there are also common traits that establish the idea and the imagery of a pan-European fiction, with its own writing, shooting, directing, and editing choices and a common feel to the narratives, characters, and genres adopted. The volume’s various chapters discuss specific trends and individual titles, with their routes to success and their circulation trajectories, and the emergence of a “quality European TV” with its own spaces and its own distribution, circulation, and promotion practices, as well as its own public discourse and recognition.

The collection’s most original feature is therefore its multilayered, systemic approach. On one hand, the various sections and chapters explicitly address most of the markets and countries where premium fiction has acquired significance over the last ten years. It does so at both a macro level (mapping the European scenario and establishing connections among nations and regions) and a micro level (zooming in on individual countries’ media systems, their key players, and important texts). While the initial chapters present the results of an original study on the emergence of premium fiction throughout the continent, the subsequent sections address the situation in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, plus some important (yet often overlooked) hubs in Central and Eastern Europe. On the other hand, the book presents various theoretical and methodological perspectives, from media economics to television production studies, from textual analysis to cultural studies, and from media sociology to semiotics. The analysis of industries and markets is balanced with an array of specific case histories probing key titles, their content, and how they have been received. The quantitative data used are original or derived from marketing studies and reports, complementing qualitative in-depth interviews, comments, promotional and publicity materials, as well as audience reactions. Several original interviews were made exclusively for this volume, providing a direct access to writers’ rooms, creation routines, development issues, commissioners’ thoughts, and distribution decisions. A large number of theoretical and methodological tools, then, has been widely deployed to investigate the texts and their production contexts.

Industry, authorship, international circulation

The collection focuses directly on several creative and production entities. It considers the major European conglomerates and the non-European companies entering the market with original ideas, content, and productions. Through a varied set of case studies addressing the textual and creative side as well as production and distribution, the book highlights the industry’s strengths and limitations, its traditions and trends, and its constraints and future perspectives. As a result, the volume offers a complex, stratified, systemic view of this crucial trend in contemporary European television.

Titles that have acquired a sizeable international audience and at least as much critical attention – such as The Crown, The Returned, The Bureau, Gomorrah, The Young Pope, Babylon Berlin, Deutschland 83, Cable Girls, and Burning Bush, to name but a few of those figuring in the following pages – can therefore be seen as the outcome of a progressive change involving a series of factors. One such was television/media production and distribution, where the co-production strategies pursued by several major European commissioners like Sky or Canal+ sat alongside the OTT platforms’ decision to fully fund various European projects, some very high-budget. Another factor was the concrete product-development practices, allied to the concept of author itself. This has shifted from the traditional European cinematographic figure of the director as deus ex machina to the imported US idea of showrunner, only to return sometimes, paradoxically, to ways of leveraging the marketing value of big names and single brands in the form of authors, screenwriters, and directors, as with Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino on The Young Pope and many others. Before the period in question, moreover, when European scripted series travelled across national boundaries, it was often by happy chance (with the obvious exception of the British productions) or anyway only in a few specific cases (as with some co-productions between European PSBs or the Nordic noir, which has succeeded more in establishing a style than in attracting huge audiences). The “premium model”, however, is structurally based on an ability to develop series both for particular national markets and, often just as importantly, for transnational if not global markets. That is true for the first flavour of pay productions to emerge, by pay TV broadcasters that were increasingly looking to make distinctive original content as the decade wore on. It is also true for the second variant, with the global OTT platforms that wanted (or were increasingly steered by regulatory needs) to make local products but always with an international flavour. From the mid-2010s, the role of the on-demand services – especially Netflix – grew and grew, as did their investment in high-budget content. The North American platforms thus came to Europe and took up a model that the pay broadcasters had already defined and honed, only they took it further. They dedicated more resources to original-content creation and had more and more titles in production at the same time in different countries. On one hand, these factors seem to threaten the purely national players’ ability to compete on budgets and on sourcing relevant stories and intellectual property, in a further move towards projects with shared production and distribution. On the other, more resources became available, so it is reported, for European producers and creative professionals (screenwriters and directors) to develop ideas and products.

The future of this European renaissance is very much up in the air in the new (post-?)coronavirus era. At stake is Europe’s ability to keep producing series that can circulate in the continent’s various countries as well as on a global stage and that are amenable to subscription models, thus contributing to strengthen the television medium’s cultural legitimacy (as it has already happened in North America, starting with the role of the cable networks). Only time will tell if these twelve years (between 2008 and 2020) represented a peak of creative quality and production quantity before a reset to a more modest role within the broader, more geographically diverse global scene. Or perhaps whether they will prove a first adventurous step en route to a second equally fecund period and the establishment of a specific model not only for premium production by pay operators and non-linear services, but also, in turn, for the enriched, more complex output by the free mainstream commercial and public service networks.

The structure of this volume

This edited collection comprises seven themed sections. Part 1 outlines the main results of a study on the genesis of the pay-series model, which developed over several years, largely during the period in question. The germ of the work dates back to 2011–2013. Carried out by Ce.R.T.A. – the Research Centre for Television and Audiovisual Media at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan (Italy) – it spotlighted the advent of the pay model in Italy when Sky Italia began producing series from the 2007–2008 season. The first fruit of this research effort was the volume Tutta un’altra fiction. La serialità pay in Italia e nel mondo. Il modello Sky, edited by Massimo Scaglioni and Luca Barra and printed by Italian publishing house Carocci in 2013. The scope has expanded in the ensuing years, until 2019, with a comparative study of the same phenomena that had taken root in parallel in numerous European markets, identifying common trends and mutual influences. In Chapter 2, the two editors offer a macro-level outline of the factors underpinning this European renaissance. In particular, they consider the major changes in the European scene on an industrial level, addressing the developments that have affected and reshaped creative and writing practices, the independent production fabric, and the broadcasters and the digital platforms, the latter with their increasingly active commissioning roles. In the third chapter, Dom Holdaway, Cecilia Penati, and Anna Sfardini discuss an initial, large portion of the comparative study’s results in greater detail. Taking a quantitative approach, and using network analysis to probe the extent of the phenomenon in the five largest European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK), they are able to highlight the country-specific traits and some across-the-board trends in European contemporary premium fiction production (such as the prevalence of drama or the growing industrial capacity). A second piece of the research is thoroughly examined in Chapter 4, by Paolo Carelli and Damiano Garofalo. Their original analysis of the quantitative data collected by Ce.R.T.A. pinpoints some of the main international circulation pathways for pay-TV fiction, in many foreign markets, which is one of the most distinctive features of the new premium model in progress.

The second section of the book is dedicated to the UK. There, pay series screened on operators such as Sky UK, Netflix, and Amazon have to contend with a rich, illustrious tradition of scripted free content with a strong international outlook. In Chapter 5, Philip Drake dissects the systemic changes accompanying Netflix’s and Amazon Prime Video’s ventures into scripted-content product...