Boom and bust

UK prodco Kindle Entertainment is behind a string of family and young-adult (YA) dramas including film trilogy Ivy & Bean for Netflix, teen mystery series The A List for the BBC and thriller series Kiss Me First for Channel 4 and Netflix.

The company became part of Banijay Kids & Family last year, a move that MD Melanie Stokes says has opened doors to new relationships.

“Banijay has a very entrepreneurial ethos, and what I really like about it [the acquisition] is you get the best of both worlds. You retain your independent editorial passion and strategy, but you get support for all sorts of things. With indies, you can get very lost in the business deals and the finance, for example,” she says.

Stokes co-founded Kindle in 2007 with joint MD Anne Brogan, who moved on to pastures new late last year. The prodco is entirely female-led, with other members of the team including creative director Emma Stuart, exec producer Pia Ashberry and director of production Sacha Whitmarsh.

“The people I have editorially bonded with have been women and then we’ve ended up working together and creating a partnership. It’s about the passion and the love of sharing those ideas and ambitions together,” Stokes says, noting that “massive improvements” have been made to get more women into the industry.

“The appointment of Lindsay Salt to run BBC Drama, which has essentially been quite a male space for quite some time, is really exciting, particularly as she’s a young mother.

The combination of her being a mother and her commercial experience working at Sky and Netflix is good news for the industry,” she adds.

Like many of her peers in the sector, Stokes identifies a trend in the market for feel-good content, but points out that this can still be achieved with darker or bleaker programming if there is an element of positivity to it. HBO Max’s adaptation of video game The Last of Us is one example of this, she notes, and has been a huge success for the streamer.

“There is a desire for things where the audience feel they can escape from the anxiety of the world we live in. Although The Last of Us is set in a really bleak dystopian world, there’s actually something really wish-fulfilling about it because what you have is two people who are bonded together and will do anything for each other. So although there’s a lot of violence, they save each other’s lives and, dare I say it, it’s actually quite a feel-good piece,” Stokes says.

The demand for feel-good content comes at a time of global turmoil, during which the world has been struck by a pandemic, wars and an economic crisis. Regarding the latter, Stokes sees it as part of a cycle that could actually have some advantages for producers.

“We have been here before and we have survived it before,” she says, referring to the recession of 2008.

“There are cycles of a boom and a bust. We’ve been through a boom with the birth of all the streamers and now they’ve hit a plateau and there’s kind of a retreat.

“What you have to do, as an entrepreneurial producer, is find new ways of funding your show. But in a way, it’s always been like that. There was this brief moment when it seemed the industry was awash with money when the streamers first launched, but that was never going to last. And maybe it’s good for producers because maybe we can hold on to more of our rights through copro negotiations.”

Meanwhile, Stokes sees an opportunity in the influx of adsupported streaming services that have hit the market, such as Amazon Freevee. “It’s interesting that ads were in, then ads were out and now ads are in again. We’re definitely trying to work out how to make friends with places like Freevee and Freeform because they serve that younger, softer YA audience. You just have to know what each of those platforms is distinctly looking for. It’s not one size fits all,” she says.

Melanie Stokes Kindle Entertainment

For its upcoming slate, Stokes says Kindle is “chasing really big IP” that is relevant to both the UK and global audiences. She adds: “We would also like to be making the next The A List – our next returning softer YA show that becomes the young people’s show, that they take to their hearts and defines their early teen years. I’d like to have a couple of family movies as well. So we’re looking at two to three things a year – that’s the target.”