Ready for Action

April 2008

Why the recent increased interest in live-action kids’ shows? One simple reason: when they work they can really work well. Many credit the live-action series Hannah Montana and the High School Musical franchise with giving the Disney Channel a much-needed shot in the arm, putting a whole new spin on the network.

But beyond ratings and the usual lines of associated merchandise, they have even greater potential. Take the Hannah Montana phenomenon. The show has generated $50 million in album sales and downloads for star Miley Cyrus, a concert tour that grossed about $36 million last year and a concert film that did $31 million in its first weekend of U.S. release in February.

That kind of potential is leading many networks and producers to put more live-action projects into development at a time when a difficult kids’ market still seems to give more advantages to animated shows.

Nickelodeon is approaching a 50-50 mix of live action and animation, says Marjorie Cohn, the executive VP of development and original programming at Nickelodeon Networks. “Live action has emerged as being just as strong as animation, which had been dominating the kids’ business for a very long time,” she says. “The immediacy of live action is really important to kids right now. The social currency, the feeling that it’s happening in real time in their lives, is exciting for them. These shows tap into a lot of the things that kids are feeling.”

Cohn suggests that popular reality shows like American Idol have instilled a feeling in kids that they could be one lucky break away from being stars themselves. “There’s something about these shows, with very relatable characters, that is both aspirational and offering a large chunk of fantasy fulfillment, that is very important in kids’ lives these days,” she says.

“People are seeing there is money in it,” says Suzanne French, the VP of children’s and family for Shaftesbury Films. She points out, too, that the quality of recent live-action kids’ fare is driving increased interest in the genre.

“The level of professionalism on the kids’ side has changed in the past five years,” she says. “Perhaps in the past there was a tendency to think it wasn’t that hard to create a good show because it was only for kids. You didn’t have to worry about coherent plots or interesting characters. As long as you put a fart joke in, kids would be fine with it. Now, there’s great writing in the kids’ world. It’s being taken more seriously than it ever has.”

Shaftesbury’s Life with Derek, a sitcom focusing on the kids of previously divorced parents who come together in a new household, appeals to a broad range of young viewers. “We realized that the different ages of the kids within the household brought in a bigger audience,” French says. “Our main core was probably the 9- and 10-year-olds who identified with our middle characters, Edwin and Lizzie. The older teenage characters brought in an older audience. And there was the little sister who was six when we started; little kids really liked her.”

The show airs on Family Channel and the French-language VRAK.TV in Canada, Disney Channel in the U.S., Nickelodeon in Australia, Boomerang in the U.K., and multiple other territories. Shaftesbury is in production on another live action show, Overruled!, set in a high school.

In Australia, government requirements on broadcasters and a generous subsidy system have helped make live-action kids’ TV a long tradition. “Australia has probably been one of the leading live-action children’s production countries in the world,” says Noel Price, who heads up Southern Star’s live-action and animated kids’ program production.

“For the last ten years, we’ve been doing a live-action series a year, 26 half-hours, usually co-productions with a European partner. We usually have one in production, sometimes two. I think the demand has always been there, certainly for the 25 years I’ve been making live action.”

There is more kids’ animation than live action in the marketplace because it’s easier to co-fund and co-produce, Price says. “But there will always be a market for live action. They’re expensive, so you need a mix of local license fees and subsidies, plus substantial foreign presales or co-production funding.”

Studio100 Media is a Belgium-based production company with several live-action kids’ shows on the air in the Benelux countries. Jo Daris, the director of international affairs, says live action has greater potential than animation for producers and broadcasters.

“Broadcasters will always have a tendency to invest more in animation,” he says. “But I do think they will understand, due to the success of things like Hannah Montana, that this has higher potential than an animation series. It can create much more channel loyalty because it’s real people. Kids are interested in becoming famous themselves. You can achieve that with Hannah Montana but no kid is ever going to say, ‘I want to be SpongeBob.’”

STAGE PRESENCE

Studio100’s strategy for many of its properties is to rely more on local licensing and ancillary revenue sources than it does on export sales. About half the company’s revenues are from merchandising. “You can do so much more with live characters,” Daris says. “You can have them sing a song, you can make a video clip, you can put them on stage singing that same song and kids love that. It’s ten times stronger if you can recognize the character from TV than if you have a suit that mimics an animated figure. If the live actor who looks you in the eye on screen also looks you in the eye in the theater, it’s the same effect a rock star has. People go crazy.”

While the potential of live action is high, producers say that getting a live-action project off the ground can be more difficult than an animated project. “Animation has new techniques and new software available so it gets cheaper and cheaper,” says Beth Stevenson, the executive VP of production and development of DECODE Entertainment, which has fared well in the past with Radio Free Roscoe and Naturally, Sadie. Next up is The Latest Buzz for Family Channel in Canada. “We just did The Latest Buzz as a multi-camera shoot, so that brought the cost down a little bit, but you still have a lot to deal with. It’s just a more difficult manufacturing process than animation,” Stevenson notes.

“It’s a lot easier to fund an animation program,” says Giles Ridge, who heads up kids’ production for Granada International in the U.K. “Different bits of animation work can be done in different parts of the world. It’s very easy to tap into co-production subsidies available, for example, in Canada and France. Live action typically is English in its tone and style and therefore it’s harder to exploit a live-action kids’ property around the world.”

Granada has been producing My Parents Are Aliens, aimed at tweens, for a number of years and it is introducing Captain Mack, a superhero live-action series for younger viewers, at MIPTV.

Price at Southern Star agrees that the degree of difficulty in dubbing live action and, in his case, its distinctly Australian look and feel, tend to limit export potential. “Animation is always more easily transferable between countries and cultures,” he says.

“You also have the fact that live action can date more quickly than animation,” he continues. “Hair styles and clothing go out of fashion. Ten years ago people had Walkmans, now they have iPods. Animation can have a shelf life of ten or 15 years. Live action, it’s probably five to seven years.”

Studio100, which until about 18 months ago sold only in the Benelux countries, has begun selling The House of Anubis, a mystery, haunted-house kind of soap with a cast of teen-agers, abroad. The challenge is that Anubis, like Studio100’s other live-action shows, is shot in Dutch. “If you want to sell into English-speaking markets it would be as a format, but in Eastern Europe, where they’re used to dubbing, you can sell the original,” Daris says.

The Little Entertainment Group in the U.K. is better known, perhaps, for Barney and Clifford the Big Red Dog than it is for live action. But it is betting a majority of the $20 million that has been invested in Roman Mysteries, a production for the BBC, that the series can defy some of the limitations of live action. The show is set in ancient Rome, A.D. 79, relating fact-based stories based on a series of books of the same name by Caroline Lawrence. Parthenon Entertainment is handling the distribution of the show worldwide.

“Live action normally becomes national,” says Keith Littler, the managing director of The Little Entertainment Group. “It’s difficult to make an international show when the backgrounds are obviously English or American or French. With Roman Mysteries, that argument was overcome. It’s timeless; we’re not going to suffer from any fashion trend. Hopefully it will be relevant for many years to come, which is what I’m going to need to get my money back.”

The series, shot in Bulgaria, Tunisia and Malta, has been sold to Germany among other markets, Littler says. “There’s a been high-definition sale in the States. It’s the most expensive and lavish children’s drama in the history of television.”

AGE MATTERS

Another constraint on the long-term success of a live-action series is the obvious fact that its cast ages from season to season. Producers use several strategies to deal with the challenge of stars’ growing pains. Some just pull the plug on a series after a few years while others recast or create a model with a rotating cast.

Price of Southern Star points out that there is an enormous difference between a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old. That’s not a problem, however, with Blue Water High, now in its third season, which is recast yearly.

“The structure has been that kids come into a surfing academy and at the end of 26 episodes, they work toward a goal where there will be a winner for the boys and a winner for the girls,” Price says. “Then another group comes in. There’s a risk in that you build up a huge amount of empathy in the audience for a particular cast and if that series is successful and you start over with a new one, you test the audience’s allegiance. But as with reality shows like Big Brother, if the concept is strong enough and the audience likes the tenor and nature and tone of the concept, then they will go with the show.”

Daris says that Studio100 generally limits teenage series to three seasons. “Once we changed almost the complete cast,” he recalls. “We wrote characters that disappeared out of the script and created new ones. That can work, but in the end if you do a show for seven years there is a certain routine that sneaks in. It’s more exciting to do something new and it usually brings better results.”

Nickelodeon’s Cohn says longevity depends on the show and the concept. “When we did Drake & Josh the kids were already 15 and they had come up from The Amanda Show. Because they were brothers, we were able to use subject matter that always stayed funny. We got a lot of comments from parents that they loved the show too. It ended up crossing over to kind of a family place while still being really satisfying to kids.”

Shaftesbury’s French says Life with Derek’s future will probably be in movies about the family. “You have to acknowledge that the cast is getting older,” she says. “The stories did evolve. The first season was about everybody getting to know each other in the house. In later story meetings, we would dismiss ideas as ‘season-one stories.’ We consciously didn’t put a ticking clock on the show, but we had to make decisions about when we wanted them to do things like get jobs and drive cars, things like that.”

With two seasons of Roman Mysteries done, Littler is pondering how to proceed with a third. “Between seasons one and two, our two lead girls were developing breasts the whole while, and Jonathan’s [actor Eli Machover’s] voice has been breaking. We can maybe do one more season or a feature film this year, but by then the kids are no longer kids. To recast is an issue because we’ve based these characters on a big-selling book series. So these characters are already imbedded. This will probably be our last year.”

THE RIGHT FIT

Like adult sitcoms and drama, the key to success with live-action kids’ fare is in the basics: concept, writing and casting. “Casting is the alchemy of talent,” says Gary Marsh, the president of entertainment for Disney Channels Worldwide, pointing to Hannah Montana. Marsh says he and the producers looked at hundreds of kids for the lead role, and they were willing to put off the show until the right girl was found. “When we first met Miley, I think she was just short of 12 and we felt she was a little young. We thought it was too big a risk. She had never really acted seriously, but she was persistent. She came back three or four more times. In that time she had gotten nine months older. And there is a level of maturity that happens at a certain age. She started to become a much stronger presence in the room. At some point we decided this was the girl. She really captured the quality of the character and the charisma that we were searching for in this role.”

For Southern Star’s Blue Water High, one can imagine every teen in Australia with a surfboard answering the call, and Price confirms that, noting that casting and working with kids isn’t a major headache. “Working with kids has its limitations in the sense that very few kids have ever done any action before they’re cast in these shows. They obviously suffer from a lack a technique because they haven’t been trained. They make up for that with a freshness and spontaneity and an instinctive ability to engage in make believe. They’re very open to game playing and role playing. They have no inhibitions. Talented kids just get out there and do it. It makes them fun to work with.”

Price spends two weeks with the cast of Blue Water High before shooting starts, working on surfing and acting. “The only times when kids become a problem, and it’s very rare, is when you have a kid who’s done something before, another series, or they’ve had a guest role in another show. The only thing worse than no knowledge at all is a little bit of knowledge. They come in telling everyone what to do, including the director. Then they can be absolute pains in the ass.”

SCRIPT SAVVY

Granada’s Ridge also puts writing at the top of the list. “Obviously production values and look and style and effects are important,” he says, “but if I was to choose any one aspect in terms of developing a successful live-action kids’ piece, it would be the quality of the writing, and in particular comedy writing. The head writer role is absolutely essential for the creation of a first-rate property. It’s the writer’s reputation and creative pitch that ultimately sells the shows to broadcasters. If you get that right and couple it with casting kids who absolutely get those parts, then you can have a very watchable and appealing show that can play a lot of markets.”

For the kinds of live-action shows Nickelodeon specializes in, concept and star power are the drivers, Cohn says. “You’re always looking for a kid who has some star potential. We’re constantly looking for our next big stars. An affinity for the material is always exciting. When you get a kid who understands all the nuances and jokes, then you know you really have something.”

Cohn sees a trend in live action toward more “high concept” shows. “The bottom line is you need a really strong concept, something that breaks through the clutter.”

Shaftesbury’s French says casting and concept are the keys. “A great concept is something you know is going to have a life and that there is a place for the concept to expand naturally, for relationships to evolve between the characters. For me, it’s something that’s a little different, that hasn’t been seen before, with a voice that feels really authentic and fun.”

When casting Life with Derek, French settled on Michael Seater as Derek fairly quickly, she recalls. “Once we settled on him, the rest of the pieces fell into place. We did a fair amount of improv at the audition to see the chemistry evolve and what kind of relationships would spontaneously develop in the room. Because it’s a family, we brought in the different people we were considering to play the dad and Derek’s younger brother. We could tell what felt natural. Gut instinct has a huge amount to do with it. Casting the lead, you can tell it when you’re in the room. Somebody walks in and they’ve got the presence. It’s palpable.”