Network Ten’s Beverley McGarvey

PREMIUM: Beverley McGarvey, the chief programming officer for Network Ten, shares with World Screen Newsflash her strategy for navigating the production, acquisitions and scheduling for TEN, ELEVEN and ONE.

WS: Of the big formats that you have acquired, what adaptations have you had to make for the Australian audience?
MCGARVEY: Every show is different and every format that we buy we do adapt because every market has a very unique cultural slant. For example, on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! Australians are generally athletic and competitive. The series is based on the fact that the competitors do challenges and the reward is food. Once the competitors started doing the challenges we realized we needed to make them harder because they were doing them too well! So we put in challenging tasks early in the series and that is a bit of a change compared to how the show runs in other markets. We suspected that would be the case but to be honest the competitors that we picked were much more resilient than we had expected. They were winning every challenge every night very quickly so we made it harder!

Australians are quite laid back, and a show like The Bachelor is really interesting when you see how the drama plays out. But how the drama plays out for an Australian audience is not the same as how it would play out for a U.S. audience. Also in terms of times slots, we tend to play our big franchises at 7:30 p.m. We pitch all our franchises to a family audience so that does affect casting and storytelling because we are aware that children are watching at that time of night. We want family audiences to watch our shows, so we tend to cast and tell stories in a more family-friendly manner. It doesn’t mean that the stories aren’t dramatic, but there are just certain places that we wouldn’t go in a show like The Bachelor.

WS: Is there a point when a format can exhibit a bit of fatigue?
MCGARVEY: There is a point at which a format does fatigue. We are in the stage in our production cycle that some of our more mature franchises are actually having a renaissance. MasterChef probably hit a low point in year five and we just had year seven. Between year five and year six the ratings went up 30 percent, and between year six and year seven they went up 14 percent. We worked with the production company to ensure that we could rebuild and reenergize the franchise and it’s in a very solid place now.

We have commissioned a lot of new shows in the last 18 months. Season three of The Bachelor recently had its highest ratings night ever other than a finale. Season three is up more than 25 percent compared to last year, so it’s a show that still has growth to it. We’ve only had year one of Shark Tank. We’ve only had year one of I’m a Celebrity. We’ve only had year one of Gogglebox, so a lot of our shows are in their infancy and we believe they have a lot of growth potential in them. We are working really hard to ensure we have shows in all stages of their life cycles so that everything doesn’t reach maturity at the same time. We have shows in year one, in year three, in year five and in year seven, to [ensure] the longevity of the schedule.

WS: Are you looking for any entertainment formats in particular?
MCGARVEY: There are a lot of cooking shows on in Australia and we have MasterChef. There are a lot of renovation shows, so we are probably on the market for something different. We have a lot of shows that play two or three nights a week and our commissioning in the next 12 to 18 months will be for more event-style shows. So rather than shows that are on two or three times a week, we’d like shows that air once maybe twice a week.

In terms of what the subject matter would be, we are relatively open. The Voice is still going well here and so is The X Factor and they run on our competitors, so we are probably not looking for one of those types of shows at this time. We are on the market for an entertainment show, definitely, but what that looks like, we’re like everybody else looking to see what the point of difference will be for the next group of those shows when they come around.

WS: Australia has a long tradition of quality drama. Tell us about your homegrown series.
MCGARVEY: We had a very strong drama slate in 2014. At the beginning of 2014 everybody had commissioned a lot of drama. As a result of that, some of it popped but a lot of it didn’t because the volume was too high and there were a lot of Australian dramas competing against each other. We are beginning to commission lots of new dramas for the next 12 to 24 months. We have a very successful series called Offspring. We had two long seasons of a series called Wonderland. We haven’t decided what we will do with those shows moving forward but we will always have a long-running 13- or 22-parter on the schedule. Miniseries and the TV movies have also done really well in Australia. We are in production on a TV movie called Mary: The Making of A Princess, about Princess Mary, an Australian girl who married Prince Frederick of Denmark; it’s a modern-day fairy tale. It’s important that we maintain our tradition of having quality drama that appeals to our audience.

WS: You have a lot of strong American series.
MCGARVEY: Yes, we have output deals with CBS and Fox. We have NCIS, Madam Secretary and The Good Wife and all the CBS summer series, Zoo and Under the Dome. We also have shows like Homeland and Modern Family. And then on ELEVEN and ONE we play shows like Hawaii Five-O and Blue Bloods. We have Sleepy Hollow and Supernatural. We have a lot of U.S. content and there is stuff coming through from this year’s L.A. Screenings as well, some of it will certainly work well.

One of the really attractive shows that we haven’t seen yet is The X-Files. That was really successful for TEN back in the day. American Crime Story: The People v O.J. Simpson is really interesting. Bradley Cooper in Limitless from CBS is probably the type of show that will translate for our audience. We also have Rob Lowe’s comedy The Grinder and the comedy Life in Pieces, which is very similar to Modern Family, which does well with our audience. It’s still early but there’s lots of good content and lots of bankable stars that are promotable.

WS: In the U.S. the trend is toward serialized shows as opposed to procedurals that have self-contained episodes. Are you experiencing any problems with serialized shows or are you able to accommodate those in your schedule?
MCGARVEY: We can accommodate them really well on ELEVEN or ONE. On our main TEN channel the shows that still go well are the NCIS and Law & Order: SVU, those types of closed-episode series. Madam Secretary works well for us. It has closed episodes but there are [continuing story lines]. The really serialized content is a little more challenging for TEN, particularly earlier in the evening, but by 9:30 p.m. or 10:30 p.m. we can make use of it on ELEVEN and ONE, but we are still at the point that closed-ended episodes work better for us.

WS: What acquired or commissioned shows have helped brand ELEVEN and ONE?
MCGARVEY: ONE skews male and ELEVEN skews younger than TEN. The brand-defining show for ELEVEN is Neighbours, which is our long, long-running local drama. It is now exclusive to ELEVEN and plays in the early evening five nights a week. On ONE, there isn’t one particular show that defines the brand. We play a lot of our sports content on ONE and that is quite brand defining. We have big events like the Winter Olympics. We have Formula 1 and a lot of motor sport. On top of that we tend to have factual-entertainment series like Cops and Undercover Boss. That type of factual content generally is what people expect to see on ONE. We have also played some male-skewing comedy and stand up that appeal to slightly older males viewers.