Exclusive Interview: Gareth Neame

Gareth Neame is the man with the golden touch in British television drama these days. His independent production company Carnival Films, which was acquired by NBC Universal in September 2008, made the biggest hit of the U.K.’s autumn season, critically acclaimed period drama Downton Abbey on ITV, and followed it up with another success, Any Human Heart, currently on Channel Four. The company also produces ITV’s crime series Whitechapel.

Scripted by Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for Gosford Park, and starring Maggie Smith in her first appearance in an episodic television drama, Downton Abbey is a “posh soap” about an aristocratic family and their servants set on a country estate on the eve of World War I. The elegantly mounted production pulled in audiences of more than 9 million viewers and hit a 32-percent share during its run on ITV, the network’s best showing for any drama in the past couple of years. In the U.S., the series was pre-sold to PBS and will air in January 2011 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Masterpiece Theatre. Any Human Heart will be on Masterpiece Theatre, too.

As head of drama commissioning at the BBC, Neame greenlit such series as Spooks, Hustle and Tipping the Velvet before joining Carnival as managing director in 2004. He is now responsible for all of NBCU’s television production in the U.K.

WS: How did the production of Downton Abbey come together?
NEAME: It’s not something that was waiting around for years. Julian Fellowes and I were working on another script that wasn’t really getting any traction, and we were having dinner one night doing a de-brief on that other project, and I said, “You know, what we should really work on together would be a return to a territory similar to what you already covered in Gosford Park and do it as an episodic series.” My thinking was to do something contemporary in feel that would really allow him to explore all the characters, as you can do in a series, with his unique knowledge of that world. I thought we could combine the elements of a well-researched period drama with a really commercial mainstream series. Julian came back to me a few weeks later and said he wanted to give it a go.

WS: How did the program come to be on ITV?
NEAME: There are really only two options in the market for this sort of project, BBC One and ITV1. I wanted the show to have the sort of broad impact that it eventually did have and that’s a different level to what one can achieve on BBC One. Of course, I had no way of knowing how successful that show would be, that it would become part of the national conversation, but I had a sense that being on BBC would be a lot more predictable. It would be sort of “the son of Cranford.” [Cranford was a very successful high-end BBC costume drama.] I didn’t want it to be part of a tradition and a portfolio of things. I wanted it to stand out. I also liked the idea of it going on ITV at nine o’clock after a great night of general entertainment (Downton Abbey was scheduled after The X Factor). I didn’t see any reason why the show should not be on ITV. It’s nice to hear people say that the show has helped to enhance the image of ITV, but I don’t subscribe to that view. I think ITV has consistently made fine dramas. But I do recognize that the show has made more impact by being on ITV.

WS: Did ITV get on board right away?
NEAME: As is often the case with these things, it was really the last thing that they were looking for but they liked it from the start. Peter Fincham [the network director] and Laura Mackie [the head of drama] were incredibly supportive and enthusiastic. It’s to their credit that they were able to take on a big beast like this in the summer of 2009, a low point for commissioning drama, when they had very few slots. They commissioned seven episodes, including a feature-length opening and finale.

WS: What role did NBC Universal’s involvement in your company play in making it all happen?
NEAME: It didn’t help to get the project off the ground, but given the circumstances of the broadcaster that wanted the show, it would have been much harder to put the production together without access to capital. I think the program would have got made but it might not have been at quite the same budget level [high-end U.K. drama costs in the region of £1 million per hour]. The integration with NBC Universal also makes a difference in that the show will be marketed by us. This is a very great advantage in that I don’t have to sell through to a third-party home entertainment, which usually means a bad deal for an independent producer, or contract a third-party television distributor and pay them commission.

WS: To what do you attribute the popularity of the show?
NEAME: The principle reason is that it follows a soap narrative. Julian has 18 principle characters, all with meaningful action in each episode, all with a journey to follow. That makes it fulfilling for the actors and rewarding for the audience. It’s a sort of posh soap, which has never really been done before. It follows the same narrative rules of complex, intertwined personal relationships. I did not want it to feel like a historical show. I wanted the mechanics to feel like a contemporary show. Julian’s writing is very economical in a contemporary way. You come into scenes later and leave earlier and take great leaps in the narrative. It isn’t a costume drama. A costume drama is usually based on a Victorian novel, where a writer has adapted Jane Austen or Charles Dickens and the underlying novel narrative must be adhered to and translated for a television audience. That is completely different job from creating an original TV show that happens to be set 100 years ago.

WS: The Downton Abbey saga is continuing. When will production begin again?
NEAME: The scripts are being written and we’re bringing the team together. Shooting starts in late February. Another eight episodes have been ordered. There will be a feature-length opening episode. I’m not sure about the finale. We always had the hope that the show would run for three years. But now I’m thinking it could have longer legs than that.