Banijay Entertainment’s three shows selected for Series Mania underscore just how far the film-TV’s giant has come in scripted, and most especially its vast range,
Apple TV+’s “Carême,” from Banijay’s Shine Fiction, opened the French TV festival, Europe’s largest, delivering a portrait of the world’s first celebrity chef, the Napoleonic-era Antonin Carême, as Variety reports, a “sex-oozing rock star.”
Playing Series Mania in International Panorama, “A Life’s Worth,” from Banijay Nordics’ Yellowbird, follows the challenges faced by the first Swedish U.N. battalion, made up of volunteers, sent to Bosnia in 1993.
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Subject of a Series Mania Forum, “Weiss & Morales” allies two of Europe’s most energetic public broadcasters, Germany’s ZDF and Spain’s RTVE, and a German and Spanish cop cracking a case in the sun-sluiced Canary Islands, against OMG landscapes, a hallmark of its Spanish producer, Banijay-owned Portocabo.
Upped to Banijay’s scripted, creative this January, Steve Matthews wouldn’t claim to have overseen development on every single scripted series at Banijay. The biggest independent TV production company in the world, Banijay as too many labels – 130, 60 of them scripted – to make that feasible.
What Matthews does do, however, as in his days at HBO Europe from 2014, before joining Banijay in 2023, is offering often young or emerging screenwriters help at a key sweet spot for some series: honing the international potential of stories grounded in local context. That means often adding a sense of genre, comprehensible for overseas viewers, or narrative propulsion.
Few TV executives are better placed to comment on the latest evolution of global TV drama. Before Series Mana, Matthews sat down with Variety to pinpoint and lend nuance to key growth axes and market challenges.
On a panel at the Berlinale Series Market, you quoted Ampere Analysis to the effect that crime thrillers accounted for 43% of the top six global streamer scripted series commissions over the second half of last year. Is this one of the major trends in market demand? And, if so, how is Banijay dealing with it?
How is Banijay dealing with it? That’s quite interesting because I don’t deal with it at all in that companies are all very grown up in their own different markets. It’s for them to find their buyers and to decide what to do. And they are all following where the market trend is going, which does seem to be crime, though I don’t think crime ever hasn’t been at the core of television.
Why is that?
Crime has certain built-in dramatic stakes and certain levels of mystery. It’s also a very, very broad church, everything from from “True Detective” through to “The Undoing.”
If such a catchall, are there any kinds of crime drama which you find particularly interesting?
In my role, when I look at genre, partly from my experience having been at a streamer, I look for certain sub-genres that are underserved, I’m always encouraging writers to look for the psychological thriller. Did my husband commit the murder or not? Where the cop arrives in Episode 2, or the non-cop domestic psychological thriller. Very hard to find. And they’ve always kind of worked. And, if I had a dollar to bet, I would bet that something in between crime and supernatural might come around.
Crime dramas can sometimes seem formulaic. But is there necessarily a reduction in quality, in artistic integrity in there being so much crime?
When I’m asked that question, I always draw people’s attention to HBO 1999-2002 which saw the great renaissance of television. Well, “Sopranos” is a crime show. “The Wire” is a cop show. Genre is an evolution. I try to encourage particularly young writers who feel that genre is some kind of constriction to look at how useful it is as a shorthand, how good it is as a scalpel to cut into society, how good it is as a lens. But as I say, particularly with the mature production companies that we have, I very rarely have to fight that fight.
Can you point to a Banijay crime drama you’re happy about?
I’m very happy, for instance, with “Weiss & Morales,” which will be showcased at Series Mania. I think it’s a terrific show. A classical, sellable, understandable, co-production between two different buyers, writers from two different territories. Cops solving crimes in the sunshine. What’s wrong with that?
Do you sense any other market trends which might be seen one way or another at Series Media?
I know less certainly about romance. But looking at Spain’s Pokeepsie Films, headed by Alex de la Iglesia and Carolina Bang, and its huge hit with “Mea Culpa,” romance seems to be quite a big area at the moment. But really, crime in all its different versions seems to me to be dominant.
Over the last few years, top European production-distribution companies – Fremantle, Studiocanal, The Mediapro Studio, Federation Studios – have moved ever more into English-language shows. This seems to back the trend of the ever larger popularity of non-English language shows just a few years back with the streamer boom.
It’s a conundrum that we’ve all been thinking about for some time. The question’s still there. Before the streamer boom, Nordic Noir already introduced the world to the possibility of subtitling TV. And at HBO Europe I found myself at the right place at the right time. We all sat in this place of like, from now on we won’t have shows with people speaking English with funny accents. If a character is from a country, they’ll speak their natural language. Then along comes “Chernobyl” and we thought, well, maybe there is a way.
Surely there is a market demand for English or paradoxically, a local language?
Yes, there are the local buyers on any production company’s market may want something one way or want something another way. I’m not going to pretend that that doesn’t create a discussion with writers and the distribution side, because the distribution market is certainly leaning in in to a more English-language direction. It’s not for me to push the companies to go one way or the other. There has to be room for both.
Aren’t there even contrary market demands at work at the moment?
Yes. Where are we on local for local? Or local for international? I remember a quote from the writer of “Chestnut Man” who said he’d been told by Netflix that essentially, if you want your Danish show to be successful on the international market, the way not to do it is to try and make it less Danish. Those of us in the local TV game were cheering reading that.
And if you sense that a local series has overseas potential?
What I try and do is let labels be as local as possible. But if I see a project that we believe has that real chance of being an international hit, then I kind of bring some weight behind it. That’s where I try and put my time, where I can just move something, pick it up that little level to make it, to bring that little extra bit of glitter and magic dust to a project in development. Some projects are just local. They’re just a little local sitcom, and that’s perfectly fine as well. One of the great things [about the current TV scene] is that it’s so big that there’s a lot of room for a lot of different things.
