Kate Ward discusses Vice Studios’ plans to expand into new genres

from Content London 2021: Day 3

Q&As with Antony Root of WarnerMedia EMEA and Francesca Johnson of Anyway Content

Den of Vice

Kate Ward, president of Vice Studios, is looking at expanding further into premium documentaries, scripted series and even formats as the youthskewing brand emerges from the pandemic. Clive Whittingham reports.

The Report

Talk about Vice at television industry events used to conjure very specifi c images and stereotypes. Roughly cut, self-shot, shortform factual content on YouTube targeting the ‘yoof’ market, for example. Or Shane Smith using his 2016 MacTaggart Memorial Lecture in Edinburgh to gleefully tell us our industry was dying on its arse and we were all idiots for pretending otherwise.

Fast-forward to 2021, after the company’s own #MeToo scandal in 2017 swept aside a lot of its former bravado and management, and Vice Studios is a very different beast. Its factual content is now more high-end, bluechip, headline-grabbing festival favourites like Netfl ix’s 2019 hit Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, or 2021’s coproduced animated feature doc Flee, which will be Denmark’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Acadamy Awards.

Kate Ward, who spent eight years in various roles at Shine Group before moving to Vice-backed Refi nery29 in 2015, became president of Vice Studios in November 2019. While careful to acknowledge the Covid-19 pandemic was a “massively shocking moment for all of us in so many ways,” Ward does say it gave Vice Studios a chance to “stop and focus on development,” with more collaboration between its hubs in India, London, Toronto and LA.

“We’re seeing tremendous growth because we had an unprecedented moment to stop and pick up some new ideas,” Ward says. “Although we weren’t there in person, thanks to the power of our screens we were able to do that and made a big effort to connect globally, so it’s been a creatively fertile period for us with a lot of innovation,” she says.

“Looking forward into 2022, we’re enormously busy with a huge number of shows in production and things coming out we’ve been working on for a long time. As far as our strategy is concerned, there are three things we’re really excited about: production and continuing to grow our business globally – how we continue our growth story in India is really important; scaling our business in North America, not only through the boom in unscripted content but we also have our fi rst scripted series, Tell Me Lies, coming to Hulu; and continuing to expand our distribution business and thinking about the global distribution of our FAST channels, which we launched this year.”

With Vice behind feature fi lms such as 2019’s The Report with Adam Driver, Tell Me Lies is

the fi rst of what Ward hopes will be many scripted series emerging from Vice Studios in the coming months and years. But how much of Vice’s traditional edgy, youth-orientated style bleeds from unscripted into fi ction productions remains to be seen.

“The thing that connects our scripted and unscripted is a sense of time and place,” Ward says. “We want to fi rmly bring our audience into worlds in a way that is super entertaining but also differentiated. We want to have a different view on talent but also to refl ect these subjects and issues that are shaping the world for young people. We want to understand them through content, not in a worthy way but a way that’s entertaining, differentiated and has a slight edge, and if not a left-of-centre point of view then certainly a point of view.”

The expansion isn’t restricted to scripted content, though. Vice is also straying into formats and the entertainment space. Ward says we “may be surprised to hear” she has a gameshow in development – she’s tightlipped about that but promises it’s not a reallife Squid Game, which would feel very Vice.

“We’re excited about the breadth of genre and bringing a sense of fun. But we’re always also acutely aware that, while there is a moment for more levity, we’re trying to refl ect subjects and issues that matter. Finding that balance and sense of purpose within the fun is important for us,” Ward says.

“The majority of our business is with streamers but it’s not exclusively so,” she says, when asked whether a youth-skewing prodco like hers even bothers pitching to public service broadcasters or linear channels at all these days. “We have a fantastic partnership in the UK with Channel 5 and we’ve been doing some really great work with Channel 4’s teen strand, so it’s a mix. But we are leaning heavily into the streamers as that premium factual and premium doc boom is happening predominantly on those services, so we’re responding to that.”

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