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JUNE 2022 EDITION
Behind the Scenes of The Midwich Cuckoos / Walter Presents’ Walter Iuzzolino Dynamic Television’s Dan March
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CONTENTS
So Many Questions Does anyone have a good method for keeping salient plot points and character backstories in your head as you wait years for your favorite OTT premium series to return?
Ricardo Seguin Guise Publisher Anna Carugati Group Editorial Director Mansha Daswani Editor Kristin Brzoznowski Executive Editor Chelsea Regan Managing Editor Jamie Stalcup Associate Editor David Diehl Production & Design Director Simon Weaver Online Director Dana Mattison Sales & Marketing Director Genovick Acevedo Sales & Marketing Coordinator Andrea Moreno Business Affairs Manager
Ricardo Seguin Guise President Anna Carugati Executive VP Mansha Daswani Associate Publisher & VP of Strategic Development TV Drama ©2022 WSN INC. 1123 Broadway, #1207 New York, NY 10010 Phone: (212) 924-7620 Fax: (212) 924-6940 Website: www.tvdrama.com
I’m in desperate need of an alternative to the let-me-just-rewatch-every-season approach. I mean, when it’s been two/three/four years since you last spent time with a group of characters, how else are you supposed to fall back in love with them and get up to speed on what they’re about to face? I realize it’s not a great method given how very much there is to watch these days. I lost quite a few weekends in the Upside Down recently as I prepared for Stranger Things’ return. So, now, obviously, I’m behind on everything else on my must-watch list. I have other burning questions: Are subscribers going to tire of streamers’ itchy cancellation fingers? Really, why invest time and effort into a show only to learn after you’ve fallen in love with it that it’s not returning? Are we going to see greater flexibility on OTT platforms’ part now that subs growth does appear to be slowing and they need more financially prudent ways to invest in great content? Are creators over their shows being binged so quickly that they fall out of the conversation in a week? And more pressingly for me, am I ever going to catch up on all the shows I want to watch? —Mansha Daswani
GET DAILY NEWS ON TELEVISION DRAMA
BEHIND THE SCENES: THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS Screenwriter David Farr and director Alice Troughton on bringing John Wyndham’s 1957 classic The Midwich Cuckoos to contemporary audiences.
TV DRAMA PIONEER AWARD: WALTER IUZZOLINO The curator and co-founder of Walter Presents is being honored for his contributions to the global scripted series business.
DYNAMIC’S DAN MARCH Dynamic Television’s managing partner on the importance of scaling up its production activities, spotting innovative concepts from across the globe, crafting smart distribution strategies and emerging opportunities with AVOD players.
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All3Media International Trigger Point / Marriage / Ridley In the All3Media International catalog, Trigger Point is about a bomb-disposal operative dealing with improvised explosive devices during a terrorist summer campaign. The series, from executive producer Jed Mercurio, stars Vicky McClure (Line of Duty). Meanwhile, Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar plays the charismatic Detective Inspector Alex Ridley in the series Ridley. BAFTA Award winner Sean Bean and BAFTA nominee Nicola Walker star in Marriage, which explores the insecurities, ambiguities, hopes and fears that are part of a long-term partnership.
Trigger Point
Signora Volpe
Banijay Rights Stonehouse / Screw / Signora Volpe Leading Banijay Rights’ highlights, Stonehouse tells the true story of disgraced Labour minister John Stonehouse. The prison drama Screw is set to return for a second season in 2023. In Signora Volpe, a former spy arrives in Italy for a wedding, only for the groom to disappear and a dead body to surface. All three series have a “high-value story [told] in an engaging and warm manner,” says Simon Cox, executive VP of content and acquisitions. “This is common across these stories, [whether] set in a prison, 1950s British parliament or a sunny Italian town.”
“These three dramas are as diverse in their storytelling as they are in the audiences they are intended to delight.” —Simon Cox
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GoQuest Media Secrets of the Grapevine / Civil Servant / Traitor GoQuest Media’s catalog features the Serbian series Secrets of the Grapevine, which centers on two winery owners who also happen to be ex-lovers. “In Civil Servant, global audiences have related to the situation of a Serbian Secret Service agent who’s learning the ropes of a new and high-risk job in the same way that they have to an ambitious man who will do anything to achieve personal success in Traitor,” says Jimmy George, VP of sales and acquisitions. Season three of Civil Servant and season two of Traitor are available now.
Traitor
“Series that offer new experiences in terms of story, location or characters will always be well received.” —Jimmy George
Troppo
LEONINE Studios Herzogpark / Troppo / Bonn Among the series LEONINE Studios is presenting, the dramedy Herzogpark offers a glimpse into the seemingly perfect lives of five starkly different women in a posh neighborhood. Troppo, based on the Crimson Lake books, centers on a criminal case in Far North Queensland. The thriller Bonn tells the story of a young woman who struggles to find her place in the male-dominated society of 1950s Germany amid a political tug-of-war. “We’re really excited to be bringing these brandnew titles to the market,” says Patrick Phelan, director of world sales.
“We are actively working on various international scripted projects from all corners of the world.” —Patrick Phelan
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Behind the Scenes: The Midwich Cuckoos Screenwriter David Farr and director Alice Troughton on bringing John Wyndham’s 1957 classic The Midwich Cuckoos to contemporary audiences in a new Sky original series. By Mansha Daswani
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creenwriter David Farr and director Alice Troughton had read John Wyndham’s critically acclaimed 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, about aliens that impregnate all the women of child-bearing age in a small English town, as children. When the opportunity arose to bring the dystopian classic to TV as a scripted series for the first time, they both jumped at the chance.
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“It blew me away a bit,” says Farr of the experience of reading the novel when he was 12 or 13. “It stayed with me for years. I met a producer 10, 15 years ago, who asked, Do you like John Wyndham? I said, Yes, particularly The Midwich Cuckoos. And he said, Well, we’re trying to get the rights. I don’t know if we can. It’s very complicated. They’re stuck in Hollywood because of the John Carpenter movie. That’s why nothing’s ever happened with this
“I wanted to make the television program much more about the women, the mothers. It’s a female story.” —David Farr extraordinary story. And then I get a phone call about four years ago saying, We’ve got them.” Farr decided to set his adaptation—produced by Route 24 and Snowed-In Productions, in association with Sky Studios—in the modern day rather than late ’50s England. He also flipped the gender of the book’s protagonist, Gordon Zellaby, in the adaptation, which airs on Sky Max. “The book is very male,” Farr says. “I wanted to make the television program much more about the women, the mothers. It’s a female story. So I changed the lead character to a child psychologist, a woman called Dr. Zellaby, whom Keeley Hawes plays. That shifted the entire drama. It became about anxiety among children and about mothers and children.”
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Troughton quickly signed up to serve as the show’s lead director, attracted to “the cleverness of it, the boldness of it, the time to spend with the characters who become parents to these children. I was just so hooked. It’s not the 1950s power dynamics between genders. There’s the theme of control over female bodies. Controlling female bodies is the essence of an uncivilized society. Until we have volition and power over our bodies again, we won’t have
“Now that we’ve finished series one, I think there absolutely should be a series two.” —Alice Troughton Credit: Colin Hutton
equality or gender parity. In a genre format, we’re allowed to explore that with imagination and creativity.” Farr and Troughton were excited about the opportunity to tell a complete story in a limited series, without having to worry about turning it into a returning production. “For me, the pleasure of adapting a book is there is an acknowledgment that you are updating it, revolutionizing it, making it relevant for now, but you’re telling that story,” Farr says. “And I’ve always preferred to have a proper ending and resolution to my shows.” Troughton adds, “It made it a joy to work on knowing that it was finite and that there wouldn’t be this huge play for a recommission. But actually, now that we’ve finished series one, I think there absolutely should be a series two.”
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TV DRAMA PIONEER AWARD
Walter Iuzzolino
Walter Presents By Anna Carugati
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alter Iuzzolino has always been fascinated by stories, whether in novels, plays, movies or TV dramas. He studied literature at university, went to film school and was a script reader. He later became a commissioning editor at Channel 4 before co-founding the streaming service Walter Presents in 2015, which offers non-Englishlanguage drama. He and his partners Jo McGrath and Jason Thorp set up the production company Eagle Eye Drama in 2019. Iuzzolino is being awarded the TV Drama Pioneer Award in recognition of his contributions to the drama genre and for elevating the status of international scripted series and the role of curated SVOD services. He talks to TV Drama about his continued appreciation of storytelling, talent and voices from around the world.
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TV DRAMA: You had been working in factual programming, and then you decided to dive into non-English-language scripted drama. How did that come about, and what led to the creation of Walter Presents? IUZZOLINO: I really enjoyed my stint in factual. It was all about brand creation and storytelling in a different space because you respond to life as it is. So [whether] a documentary or even a Bear Gryllstype program, it’s about a human being cast in an extreme set of circumstances. And with a camera and as a producer, you are following that and telling that story in the most coherent way possible. However, drama had always been in my blood because of my university background. What tipped me over The Franco-German crime thriller The Crimson Rivers, sold the edge and made me by ZDF Studios, is on Walter Presents services. launch Walter Presents was a real nostalgia for that. Because I am Italian, I come from a country where scripted drama is still largely dubbed. The advantage of growing up in a dubbing country is that I was spoiled because I was used to a lot of international drama as a viewer. Therefore, you were able to watch and appreciate textures, paces and tonal bits of storytelling that were very different from one another.
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When I moved to London 25 years ago, I was quite struck by the absence of that variety. I was missing the Italian bit and the French bit and the German bit. So [I] was trying to go back to my Walter Presents has among its offerings The Truth Will Out, heritage and what I a Swedish psychological crime thriller sold by Banijay Rights. used to feast on. When the company I was working with was sold, I was left with the choice of: do I stay for another five-plus years or do I take the leap and jump? I was thinking, if I don’t do it now, will I have the courage to do it a few years down the line? I decided to do it because I was very much inspired by the work the BBC was doing. It started with Spiral and followed with The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen. And I thought, that’s it. The audience is there. We just need to corral them to a place that is as rich and diverse and exciting as it could be. At the time in the U.K., international drama was largely Scandi drama. Everybody just used [the success of] The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen as the one parameter by which you judge international subtitled drama. I knew that there was a lot more, from France, Italy, Germany, etc. I wanted to explore that. That’s what made me think, let’s jump into it. TV DRAMA: How did Eagle Eye Drama come about, and what opportunities did you see in the market? IUZZOLINO: That came about for two reasons. First, it was me being exposed to all these wonderful stories from all over the world. The
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script reader in me was titillated again, thinking, wow, that’s a beautiful Flemish show, but there’s something in that story that could make it fantastic in the U.K., for example. So first, it was a sense of scouting great formatted storytelling that I thought could lend itself very well to international adaptation.
“Through Walter Presents, I had learned to fall in love with wonderful creatives that were operating all over Europe and all over the world.” But there’s another reason, which is maybe the more powerful motivation. Through Walter Presents, I had learned to fall in love with wonderful creatives that were operating all over Europe and all over the world. They were outside the Anglo-American system. I remember speaking to commissioners, heads of channels, friends and colleagues in the business, and they were all lamenting the fact that everybody was super busy, and the industry was so flourishing that there was no talent around. I remember thinking, that’s not true. It’s that we’re just looking in the same small pool. If we could look beyond the U.K. and U.S., there are so many extraordinary program makers that never got the opportunity to project their talent onto our world. Eagle Eye was born as a combination of knowing that there were great stories that merit adaptation, but more than that, the joy of bringing great new talent into the system.
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Dan March Dynamic Television By Mansha Daswani
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ot long after the launch of Dynamic Television in 2013, the company’s managing partners, Dan March and Klaus Zimmermann, recognized that as a distributor of premium content, it needed to be involved much earlier in the value chain. Stepping up its production business over the last few years has allowed the company to expand its slate of highend drama series, which includes the Jane Seymour-led Harry Wild for Acorn TV and the blue-sky procedural The Sommerdahl Murders. March tells TV Drama about the importance of scaling up its production activities, spotting innovative concepts from across the globe and crafting smart distribution strategies.
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