This week: tax incentives for UK TV, the visual style of trough TV, Sky Docs production opportunity
Tax incentives for UK TV productions
The dust has now settled on the - very welcome - tax credit for indie film announced in the budget a few weeks ago, and more voices are now urging for similar support for the rest of the UK TV production sector. In particular for British-specific content that doesn’t travel as well internationally and therefore is harder to finance.
Jane Tranter, CEO of Bad Wolf this week appeared in front of the UK Parliament’s culture, media and sport committee, where she pointed out that UK focussed TV content is less appealing to inward investment, and therefore needs more support to thrive in the current market.
We need to look at some of the lower-end shows … which are too UK-focused to really attract any inward investment and they are becoming increasingly difficult to make.
It’s gotten a bit out of whack. Protection for those lower-cost shows — in the same way that my colleagues excellently got for the £15M and under films in the UK — would be really helpful.
In the Deadline article about her appearance, BFI research shows that 78% of the £4.2bn spent on UK film & TV production in 2023 was from inward investment.
Andy Harries of Left Bank Pictures made a similar observation in his speech when accepting the BPG Harvey Lee Award For Outstanding Contribution to Broadcasting this week. He said:
So I ask – would Boys from the Blackstuff, Hillsborough, or Our Friends in the North be made these days? How about Five Daughters, This Is England, The Deal, Longford or even The Royle Family? I am not so sure. Are we in danger of our business ending up as a first class, top-end service industry to the US at the expense of our own experiences – shows that reflect our own lives in the UK? Perhaps the answer lies in extending the 40% tax allowance recently introduced in the last budget for British movies to single films and limited series on TV that are specifically British.
Derek Drennan also called for tax incentives specifically for reality/unscripted TV in a Broadcast opinion piece, observing:
These days even the broadcasters/SVODs with money (ha) aren’t fully funding productions and so now even when you get a greenlight, the biggest obstacle is that funding gap – which for small producers with limited resources and lack of help from broadcasters means a massive crossroads unfortunately mainly resulting in no programme.
In this absolute uncertain madness, it is increasingly evident to me that something as simple as a tax break for unscripted could be a massive game-changer.
Read the Deadline article: Doctor Who Producer Jane Tranter urges tax credit rethink
Read Broadcast: Is unscripted the forgotten child? (subscription needed)
Trough TV and aesthetic uniformity
This week, Phillip Maciak has written a thoughtful piece for The New Republic about the visual style of prestige TV. He talks about how the “bland uniformity” of prestige TV’s aesthetic is in danger of smoothing out individuality and the idea that a human - warts and all - is the creator and storyteller of these shows.
Often, when style comes up in terms of contemporary television, it’s about style as a problem. Or, more specifically, it’s about a certain bland uniformity of style that testifies to both the pretension and cheapness of the Peak TV environment. Networks and streamers want shows to look “good,” but that designation is less about quality or imaginative production design than it is about a set of visual tropes that read to well-trained viewers as “good.”
He observes that AI is a significant threat to the art form that is TV and film, and suggests the visual style of prestige TV is in danger of mimicking how AI produced content might look and feel, rather than offering up productions that clearly have been made by flesh and blood humans.
On X/Twitter, Maciak did a great thread of articles that inspired him to write the above piece - each one he mentions is worth a read.
One of them is Sam Adams recent piece in Slate about our journey into 'Trough TV’, the current downward slide from the golden age peak of the noughties. He is clear that it is not just the glut of scripted programming that defined the peak, but also how the stories within the shows were structured, and in particular, how quickly shows were being canned with no satisfactory conclusion.
For a viewer, devoting yourself to a TV series has always been a fraught proposition, especially as serialized storytelling has come to dominate the form. There’s no guarantee the story you’ve invested in will get a satisfying ending, or even any ending at all. But for a while, the prevailing wisdom seemed to be that concluding a series, even in a different format, would make the whole more valuable…
In recent years, though, the old TV-industry thinking seems to be reasserting itself that extending a little-watched series is just throwing good money after bad… But when a passionate fan base is no longer enough to keep a show alive, especially when that fan base is paying the network directly instead of in the secondhand currency of eyeballs and attention spans, it feels as if a contract has been broken, a rosier future smothered by pedestrian reality.
More data on Peak TV’s spending strategies
A follow up to Variety VIP+’s report into the death of peak TV demonstrates how streamers (Netflix aside) overspent on original content. “… on all of the major U.S.-based SVOD services except Netflix, the top 20 most-watched TV seasons in 2022 accounted for more than 80% of original series viewing hours.”
The visualisation below uses data from Luminate:
New Sky Docs opportunity for diverse production companies
Sky Documentaries, headed by Poppy Dixon, has launched a new opportunity for UK production companies owned or led by people of ethnic minorities or people who are deaf, disabled, and/or neurodivergent.
Three companies will be selected to get £15,000 towards their development slate plus they will also take part in a six month collaborative process with the Sky Docs commissioning team to further develop their ideas.
The application process closes on April 19th, 2024.