eOne’s John Morayniss

As CEO of Entertainment One (eOne) Television, a unit of Entertainment One, John Morayniss oversees one of the leading creators, producers and distributors of television product across a number of genres. eOne has already provided series to major U.S. and Canadian networks, including Rookie Blue on ABC, Hung for HBO, The Bridge for CTV, Haven for Syfy and Hell on Wheels for AMC. Morayniss has built up a particular expertise in international co-productions, which, as he tells World Screen Weekly, are the key to many successful TV projects.

WS: eOne has been active in co-productions for a long time. How have you seen these deals evolve?
MORAYNISS: I don’t think co-production is the right word anymore. They are partnerships among broadcasters. If you look at something like Hell on Wheels, last year it was just a twinkle in our eye, but now we’ve already shot the pilot and will begin production in the coming months on the series in Canada although it’s not Canadian content. We got the show because AMC developed it with Endemol and then the show was laid off on us because Endemol didn’t want to necessarily take on all of the risk and studio responsibility. We came in and decided to finance the pilot and take all the distribution rights. But we are an independent and this was a one-hour pilot with no guarantee that it would go to series. Since Endemol was involved in the development, we called them and said, let’s co-invest in the pilot and we’ll split the distribution territories. To me, that’s a co-production, but it’s not the way you would have thought about it 15 years ago, when there was a treaty and it was about getting the right elements and making sure it qualifies [for subsidies].

Hell on Wheels, instead, stands on its own merits. Creatively we have no restrictions; it’s shot in Canada, but it’s not Canadian content, so we cast who we want to cast and the writers are chosen based on who we want. It’s a co-production with eOne, Endemol and AMC.

WS: It’s not the way it used to be when to qualify as a co-production and receive subsidies you were required to have, say, an English writer, German actor and a French director of photography.
MORAYNISS: No, to me that’s very anachronistic, and it’s like putting a round peg in a square hole. That’s what’s great about what’s happening now. These projects are driven by the content and not by the financing. Of course, necessity is the mother of invention, so we have to find partners who aren’t saying, “Well, we need grants so let’s get a French partner.” Today the aim is, who are the buyers out there that work with this content?

Haven is a good example because you have Universal Networks International and its Syfy channels. They came in independently of Syfy U.S., pitched Haven to a bunch of channels in the U.S. Obviously Syfy made a lot of sense because it’s on brand. And quite frankly, even if we had gotten a bigger offer from another network, depending on who that network was, we still might have gone with Syfy because you have a better chance of the show being successful. We’re not as concerned with securing financing for season one if we believe in the potential of the show to be renewed and sold in multiple territories. What we’ve learned is to look a little more to the future. Rookie Blue works really well on ABC because it just feels like an ABC series. The Bridge didn’t work on CBS, but they slotted it in on Saturday nights at 8 o’clock and it’s a 10 o’clock show. So it’s not just about the money, it’s who is the right partner? Is the show on brand? If any other international broadcaster comes in, will they be of like mind with the other broadcast partners? That’s more important than in what territory you can get subsidy money and soft dollars.

WS: eOne has considerable expertise in producing scripted series. Are you also looking to expand into formats?
MORYNISS: Scripted will be our bread and butter, but we’re definitely interested in formats. We co-produce Skins for MTV. We’re working with Company Pictures in the U.K. that produced the original version. The series is set in the U.S. but we shot the first season in Toronto. It’s technically a co-venture; in other words, it qualifies as Canadian content but under more flexible rules so that we get a decent amount of money out of Canada and a premium license fee, but doing it as a co-venture means that all of the partners have a lot more creative influence. We can also have more North American elements, not just Canadian elements, which was really important to the showrunners of the original U.K. show, who are also running this show. So that’s a scripted format that seems to be working on MTV and worked well in the U.K.

There is definitely opportunity in the scripted space to look at non-North American versions and then recreate them for a North American audience.

What I’d like to do more—and we haven’t done yet—is take some of our successful shows and then duplicate them in international markets.

WS: What new projects are you working on?
MORAYNISS: We’ve got a few projects in the works that we’re very excited about. We’re teaming up with HBO and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Cooper’s Town Productions on a new drama series called Upstate, which is about a guy who gets laid off from his job and has to relocate his family to rural America to become a correctional officer in a new private prison run for profit.

We’re producing the first two TV movies for CMT’s newly launched original movie division, To the Mat (working title), starring Ricky Schroder and actress-singer Laura Bell Bundy, and Reel Love, starring actress-country star LeAnn Rimes, which will be released in late summer.
 
And we’re currently developing a project called Among the Spirits, which is a drama series about Houdini and Doyle solving mysteries in the 1920s that we’ve set up at Syfy in the U.S. That one sounds like a great co-production to me.