L.A. Screenings Buyer Feedback: Mediaset

LOS ANGELES/MILAN: After viewing pilots in Los Angeles, Francesco Mozzetti, the head of acquisitions and sales at Italy’s leading commercial broadcaster, Mediaset, noted, “this was the year of procedurals, after vampires and doctors had monopolized last year’s Screenings.”

Mozzetti and his team were satisfied of the content that will be available to them through volume deals with Warner Bros. International Television Distribution and NBC Universal Television Distribution. “We are interested in buying many of the shows coming from Warner Bros. and Universal,” he says.

“As Mediaset operates both free- and pay-TV channels, all of which demand programming, we are quite satisfied with the quality of the shows we saw, for example Shameless [produced by Warner Bros. International Television Distribution and picked up by Showtime] is an excellent series for pay TV,” continues Mozzetti, who was also impressed with the rest of the Warner Bros. slate. “For example, Chase, [a Jerry Bruckheimer action drama] and The Whole Truth, whose pilot will be re-shot, but we even liked it in its original version. For our free-TV channels we also like Undercovers [a J.J. Abrams spy drama] and the sitcom Mike & Molly.”

Mozzetti also found NBC Universal’s slate to be particularly solid and abundant. “We have high hopes for The Event, which is in the same vein as Lost and FlashForward, and we also noticed the exhilarating Love Bites [a romantic comedy anthology series].”

Amidst the series offered by other studios Mozzetti notes, “From CBS we thought Hawaii Five-O was very good, and it’s a genre that hadn’t been done in a while; The Big C from Sony Pictures Television is good for pay TV. The Good Guys [an action comedy from Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution] was quite original, and among the series on offer from Disney Media Distribution, we thought the best was Body of Proof [a drama starring Dana Delaney] even though it repeats some of the dynamics we have seen in other series.”