NATPE Europe Panel Weighs In on Co-Productions

PRAGUE: The pre-market sessions at NATPE Europe today included a look at the prodigal son of the content business, the co-production, with a panel that featured Versailles producer Claude Chelli, BBC Worldwide's Ben Donald, Sky's Anne Mensah and others.

Once scorned as a ‘Euro-Pudding,’ the co-production is very much back in favor—and there was near unanimity as to why. Speaker after speaker echoed the observation of Ben Donald, the executive producer of international drama at BBC Worldwide, that a successful co-production requires “the coming together of broadcasters and platforms with similar audience and programming profiles and sharing similar storytelling traditions.”

Echoing Donald’s point, Anne Mensah, Sky’s head of drama, was emphatic that, “we’re Europe’s largest investor in content, and for us at Sky, a co-production is always first and foremost a creative exercise and a financial one second. We pick projects we like and we seek to match them with partners we like—partners such as NBC, HBO, CANAL+ and Showtime—and that works for us.”

Capa Drama's Claude Chelli, producer of Versailles (due to debut later this year on CANAL+), while concurring with the importance of broadcast partners sharing similar audience profile and what he termed “a kind of kinship” also tapped the importance of keeping the number of broadcast partners as small as possible, revealing, “Of Versailles’ 27 million euros ($31 million) budget we got approximately one-third from CANAL+, 20 percent from Canada, with the rest made up from distribution funding and tax-shelter deals. This meant CANAL+ was our only broadcast partner, making life much easier and simpler.”

Chelli also suggested that financial imperatives can be legitimate motivation for a co-production, “especially as we in Europe need to produce bigger shows if we are to challenge the Americans”—a view which drew support from Donald, who noted, “There are recent examples of co-productions where all parties have contributed as much as they would have done to a local domestic production, but they have done this with other parties because the resulting increased spending on the project will give a vastly more exciting and better product than they could have achieved alone with just their budget.” But both agreed, as Chelli put it, “there must always be an artistic impulse to make the project really valuable.”

Of course, had there been total unanimity there would have been a danger of the audience rioting to demand a proper television panel, and dissent was duly and obligingly supplied by Eric Welbers—producer of The Homecoming, Maria and Costa Concordia, among others—whose opinion differed from the general warmth for the co-production, with the view, “If you do not have to co-produce, then do it alone.” Although he did agree, “If you do have to co-produce you should choose your project and partners carefully and accept that you are going to have to work harder.”

But the overwhelming sentiment of today’s closing session was that the co-production, so long television’s prodigal son, has returned and has returned to a warm and enthusiastic welcome.