Sony Pictures Television’s Nina Lederman on multilingual programming

Leonardo

Speaking the same language

The global television industry has evolved drastically over the past three years, to the point that any received wisdom about audience tastes and viewing habits needs to be rethought and re-examined.

Amid this new world order, where monster hits can seemingly come from anywhere, regardless of country, culture, colour or creed, Sony Pictures Television (SPT) believes it is well positioned to serve up projects with truly universal appeal.

SPT has long viewed itself as a key supplier of content in the global TV space, thanks to its vast production and distribution resources, major overall deals with writers and showrunners and, crucially, its lack of affiliation with a major streaming platform.

The pandemic did little to slow SPT’s momentum, and it was relatively quickly able to return to production on series such as Leonardo, the period coproduction with partners from Italy, Spain, France, the US and the UK, and Anne Boleyn, another period piece involving UK and US partners.

As the globalisation of the content industry has continued to gather pace, SPT is leveraging its resources in an increasingly strategic way to identify new stories and tell them in innovative and authentic ways. So says SPT’s executive VP of global scripted development and programming, Nina Lederman, whose role is to facilitate creative and logistical partnerships between SPT’s US and international production teams.

That independence and freedom is becoming particularly beneficial as SPT works to build its slate of multilingual programming.

“As sellers, SPT has the opportunity to sell storytelling for the masses in various languages, and our showrunners have the ability to create for everywhere and anywhere, whether it’s in English or other languages,” she says.

A case in point is XRey, the eight-part multilingual drama about the life and reign of Spain’s King Juan Carlos I, who abdicated abruptly in 2014 after four decades.

Based on a critically acclaimed Spanish podcast, the project is creatively led by Howard Gordon (24, Homeland) and Alex Gansa (Homeland), founders of US production company Gordon & Gansa, with Spanish prodco Weekend Studio. Lionsgateowned streamer Starzplay is on board as the distribution platform.

Multi-partner, cross-territory projects like XRey are set to become increasingly common for SPT, says Lederman. In addition, in the coming months SPT will announce “numerous projects that come from creators and showrunners who are based in the US but are not necessarily American and not necessarily writing about themes that are American.”

Lederman says she thinks bilingual and even trilingual series will become more common in the years ahead, creating space for languages that haven’t been heard as often in big-budget drama series. “English plus another language is a fairly easy coproduction, but there might be other languages that mix and match too.”

SPT has an embarrassment of riches on the production front, including wholly owned or joint-venture production companies such as the UK’s Left Bank Pictures, Eleven, Eleventh Hour Films, Fable Pictures and Blueprint Pictures; Brazil’s Floresta; Colombia’s Teleset; and US-based Embassy Row.

Lederman says creative “marriages” between production companies within the SPT group will also happen more often, noting that it has various projects in the works between its UK- and Latin America-based production companies.

Aside from its broad stable of production companies, another key source of stories for SPT is its partnership with Nigerian broadcaster EbonyLife, through which three projects are currently being packaged and are set to be taken out to buyers. The partnership has brought SPT into the orbit of a plethora of new IP and creators, notes Lederman.

More recently, the companies partnered on Àló (which translates as ‘once upon a time’ in the Yoruba language), a new programme offering a unique platform for writers of African heritage. “It’s our creative responsibility to tell stories and make content that attracts viewers worldwide,” says Lederman.

“We’re in the culture business, and we’re in the ‘otherness’ business – these audiences are all others to someone else. We believe that if you make the best content, with authenticity of storytelling it will resonate with a broad world market.”

Sony Pictures Television’s Nina Lederman tells Jordan Pinto how the independent US studio is looking to feed the streaming sector with multilingual programming.

Nina Lederman

Hear more from Nina Lederman in the Navigating Rights & IP in a Global Coproduction Marketplace session today at 9.30am in Hall 2.