Christina Jennings

World Screen Weekly, May 15, 2008

Chairman and CEO

Canadian programming appears to be experiencing somewhat of a renaissance. Already established as major exporters of content to the international market, Canadian producers have received a bit of a boost as of late, with a number of their shows finally cracking the tightly closed U.S. network landscape. The Listener, a new production from Shaftesbury Films, is among the Canadian dramas that has received a pickup in the neighboring U.S. The series, about a young man who is able to read minds, is set for a prime-time slot on NBC.

“It was originally pitched to us as a feature film,” says Christina Jennings, the chairman and CEO of Shaftesbury. “We stopped the writer mid-pitch and said, This is a television series.” Shaftesbury took the show to CTV, which financed a pilot and subsequently greenlit 13 hours. Shortly after MIPCOM, Shaftesbury began targeting the U.S. broadcasters, and Jennings notes, “NBC jumped faster than anybody else.”

Jennings says that the effect on Shaftesbury of NBC’s order was immediate: “Suddenly you have something that is quite extraordinary, and there was a lot of interest.”

While it has its own sales division, Shaftesbury opted to sign off the distribution rights to the show to Elisabeth Murdoch’s ShineReveille International. The company took a similar path with its period crime drama Murdoch Mysteries, which has been a tremendous hit for Citytv in Canada and is being sold worldwide by Granada International. “When we decided to get into the distribution business—and it’s an expensive game—we decided we would focus on kids’ and family programming,” Jennings explains.

The emphasis has allowed the Shaftesbury Sales Company, led by Shane Kinnear, to focus its efforts on shows like Life with Derek, a tween live-action comedy with 70 completed episodes that has been licensed into more than 100 territories, including the U.S. with Disney Channel. The long-running series has also become an important franchise for Shaftesbury, which has extended the show into a host of licensing and merchandising categories. Next up on the kids’ front is Overruled!, a live-action comedy that is also set to air in the U.S. on Disney Channel.

On the distribution front, Shaftesbury is also emphasizing the Booky movie franchise, with another title in the works, and it is holding on to the rights to the eight-part drama Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, based on Vincent Lam’s novel about the personal and professional lives of a group of conflicted young doctors. “We’ve done a lot of adaptations of literature,” Jennings notes, “and we acquired the rights to this book prior to Lam winning the [Giller] book prize and prior to Harvey Weinstein picking up the book rights in the States.”

Going forward, Shaftesbury is looking to maintain and build on its strong production and development slate across the TV movie, series and kids’ genres. “We put a lot of our own money into development,” Jennings says. “What it means is that as the market changes, as it always does, we’ve got TV movies when people are looking for TV movies, we have one-hour series when people are looking for one-hour series. We go from science fiction to straight drama to comedies. We have a big portfolio and we’re able to quickly respond” to broadcasters’ needs, she says.

Targeting the needs of networks, both in Canada and abroad, has been at the heart of the company’s strategy since it was founded by Jennings two decades ago. Looking ahead, Jennings notes that a priority is building its business in the U.S. Toward that end, the company recently signed a representation deal with the William Morris Agency. Another key focus, Jennings says, will be digital content, given the success of online extensions to shows like Life with Derek and the science-fiction hit ReGenesis. “We’re going to be getting into the multiplatform world in a much bigger way. Not just so we create great websites for our own content, but where we can create original content for the web. That will be a big financial commitment that the company makes over the next year.”

What won’t change, she notes, is that Shaftesbury is “first and foremost a content provider. We’re creative producers, we’re not deal-driven producers.”