RTÉ’s Dermot Horan

Dermot Horan, the director of acquisitions and co-productions at RTÉ, talks to World Screen about how he is filling RTÉ’s slots and the responsibilities a public broadcaster has to inform and entertain during these challenging times.

In a “normal” year, Horan would be recently returning from Los Angeles after having attended the screenings hosted by the various U.S. studios. In fact, it would be the 26th year for Horan at the L.A. Screenings. While COVID-19 has turned our everyday world and the TV industry on their heads, and in today’s “new normal,” Horan still needs imported films and TV series—now more than ever given the halt in production and the cancellation of so many sporting events.

WS: Setting aside the pandemic, how do imported programs complement RTÉ’s schedules on its various platforms? What would you be looking for this year?
HORAN: They absolutely do because RTÉ is of a size and scale, a bit like the Nordic countries or Belgium or Holland, that we cannot produce ourselves or commission the volume of both high-end fiction—comedy and drama—and natural history that the BBC does. We can’t do that ourselves. We produce good factual, lifestyle, news and current affairs, which our viewers appreciate, especially now. When we do our own drama—we got involved with Normal People at an early stage, and that is performing very well for us—that does well in spades. We do recognize we need to acquire programming because you can’t have a schedule based too much purely on factual and entertainment. We do need fiction.

In terms of our appetites, they certainly have changed. There was a time when the 22-episode network series was a staple, particularly on the second channel. And the longer the series, the better—13 had gone to 22, hey 22 episodes! Now 22 is more of a hindrance. We do buy a few 22-parters. We show Blue Bloods, for example. If you are Irish and something is set in America, you cannot be more Irish than Blue Bloods! We tend to wait for that show a bit and then run double episodes over 11 weeks. The whole appetite in linear television has gone away from stretching a single show over 22 weeks and compressing everything into shorter-run series that can make more impact over a shorter period. It also means you can refresh the schedule on a more regular basis.

If I look at my top-rated acquired shows, it is more series like Killing Eve, TheHandmaid’s Tale, Homeland, Doctor Foster, Happy Valley, The Night Manager. They are 6, 8, 10, maybe 12 episodes, tops. Some are American. The Good Fight is a case in point. We love The Good Fight. But they are fairly sassy, quite sophisticated, aspirational shows with an excellent cast. Also, when you have a shorter-run show, it’s not always the case, but chances are, you can command a better cast than you can when someone has to devote 45 weeks a year to a show.

Those are the shows I’m looking for, and the funny thing is at the L.A. Screenings in recent years, even though the Screenings follow the upfronts, it hasn’t necessarily been the network shows I’ve been most interested in. In fact, our most successful show from last year’s Screenings was Godfather of Harlem. What a great cast. How good that show looked. It’s also a show that lets people feel they have learned something. A second season has been announced. I know it’s one of the more ambitious shows and may take a while to get back into production, but we’re hoping to be able to show season two when it’s available.

WS: There’s been a halt in production and sports events have been canceled. How is RTÉ filling its slots, and what role does imported programming play in that?
HORAN: Obviously, a huge amount when it comes to sport. When you look at those big sporting events, in many ways, they are counter-intuitive to the regular schedule. [The TV season] in the Northern Hemisphere runs September to May, and [broadcasters] tend to run repeats in the summer. But the big sports, the UEFA European Championships, the Olympic Games, all take place in the summer. We also have our indigenous Gaelic football and that’s huge here. We can get 60 percent shares with those games.

All of that has meant that during the summer, we are left with gigantic holes in the schedule and they are largely being filled by acquired programming. You are not going to blow your budget [during the summer]. So just as ITV and the BBC are holding on to their [programming] stock for the autumn—because if they use their stock now, they will have nothing for the autumn because no scripted has been produced in recent months—we’re not going to transmit extremely valuable Irish high-end programming in July and August.

So, we’re mainly filling the empty sports slots with a combination of movies and series. Movies still form an important part of what we do, particularly on our second channel. If a sports event has been canceled, that might be a two or two-and-a-half-hour block; a movie does the job quite well. We then picked up several series that we hadn’t picked up thus far, essentially because we didn’t have the slots for them. We’ll be running Yellowstone, which I think will do well in Ireland. You’ve got a big name with Kevin Costner. It’s shot beautifully, and we know there are three seasons, so we’ve got some stock over the next 12 months because this will probably play over 12 months before we are fully restocked.

We’ve also picked up a strong new Australian series called The Secret She Keeps, which the BBC also picked up. Although it’s set in Australia, it stars Laura Carmichael, who played Lady Edith in Downton Abbey, so there is a recognition factor for Irish audiences. It’s a female-skewing thriller, a six-part series we can run over six weeks in the summer.

We’ve also bought programming for specific slots [and this] applies to the afternoons, where there were many sports events as well. We’ve found that our over-70 seniors have been cocooned [at home]. We have been promoting the fact that we are running a season of very strong library feature films from the classic era—everything from Spartacus to Oliver to Doctor Zhivago to Casablanca to The Magnificent Seven to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We’re running films on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, [some of which] are very long. For three or three-and-a-half hours, you hope people will forget about COVID-19.

We’ve also bought some classic miniseries from the ’70s: Roots, The Thorn Birds, North and South with the young Patrick Swayze. These air in the afternoons and there is a decent audience. The daytime audience is bigger because people are stuck at home. It’s been dramatic here, a third of the population is now unemployed or having part of their salary paid for by the Irish government. We need to give them escapism as well, which can be something brand new or something nostalgic.

WS: What have you heard regarding when production will resume?
HORAN: Everyone is trying to follow models from those first out of their traps. For example, the Australian soap opera Neighbours for Network 10 was the first prime-time soap opera to go back into production under COVID-19 restrictions, social distancing, hygiene, etc.

We have a four-times-a-week soap opera called Fair City. The BBC has EastEnders. ITV has Coronation Street and Emmerdale. Many European countries have prime-time soap operas, which are the backbone of their prime-time schedule before 9 o’clock. We are all trying to learn. We’re not the same as Neighbours. Neighbours is shot in Australia; it’s very sunny with a big lot. They don’t do that many interiors. Our soap opera is more like the British ones; they have more interiors. But we are all learning.

I discovered that NRK, the public broadcaster in Norway, is back into production on at least two prime-time dramas, under COVID-19 restrictions. Netflix is shooting a series in Iceland. Eastern Europe will probably be there before Western Europe because the Czech Republic and Slovakia have done a magnificent job in terms of stemming the tide [of the coronavirus] and closing their borders. They are reopening, so I would say studios in Prague and Bratislava will be opening up. That won’t just be for their local TV; that will potentially be for HBO and Netflix in Europe.

People will have to go out and find places where they can shoot. I figure that in Los Angeles, you’ll find that those shows that go back into production are those where they can most control the environment. Take a show like The Good Fight: probably 80 percent of it is shot in a studio. If your law office or courtroom is in a sound stage, you can control that. You might need to use three sound stages rather than two. You will maybe need to add some of the extras in post-production, but you can handle the hygiene, taking everyone’s temperature in a controlled, cordoned off studio environment. I know people have been talking about serving meals almost like airline meals, sealed, rather than those [buffet] tables where you can just graze!

Whereas a show like Killing Eve, one scene is in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, the next in the Pantheon in Paris. That kind of shoot is going to be much more of a challenge until there is either a cure for the virus or a vaccine.

WS: Speaking of COVID-19, RTÉ has always been known for quality and public service. How is it serving its audience during these difficult times?
HORAN: In Ireland, we are considered to be the voice of information, the voice of truth, I suppose. This is quite common among public broadcasters in Europe. Not only are most of the public broadcasters in Europe the biggest in terms of audience share. They may be struggling financially, but when it comes to news and current affairs, they are the respected voices. The prime minister or the minister of health has been on RTÉ almost daily. They recognize that we are the repository for information. Our audiences for news and current affairs have been enormous. That’s been true across all of the EBU [European Broadcasting Union] members. I’m vice president of the EBU TV committee and we’ve been looking at all the other EBU members, and they are getting historically high figures for news and current affairs.

I suppose there comes that critical fatigue factor, and you need to mix up the schedule. You need to be the repository of news and current affairs but also be able to entertain and make people laugh as well, so it’s trying to get that balance. We have a strong brand called Operation Transformation, which, every January through the end of March, is a show about getting fitter, eating better, better lifestyle, better wellbeing, with a whole series of experts. We choose a number of people who volunteer, and hopefully, at the end of that period, they end up slimmer and with a better mindset. They’ve done a special version, how to stay healthy, eat well, cook and prepare food, and stay fit if you are stuck at home. That has been working really well.

We’ve got a top chef who works in a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Dublin, Mark Moriarty and he’s got a show about cooking from home, and every week there is a baking item, which is really important because everyone is home baking. At one stage you couldn’t get flour in the supermarkets!

Those shows are quick turnaround, but our whole schedule can’t be quick turnaround shows shot on Skype or Zoom. People still crave high production values, pure escapism.

WS: Are viewers watching differently than they did in “normal” times?
HORAN: We’ve seen a pick up on the RTÉ Player. People have definitely found the RTÉ Player. People who maybe have only recently found Netflix have now suddenly said, I’ve seen everything on Netflix I want to see; I’ve seen Tiger King and Unorthodox. What else is there? Oh, look at what RTÉ has. RTÉ Player has all the best historical Irish content, and we also have box sets of Frasier and ER. Viewers have found that in numbers. That has been a change, and hopefully, that will stay.

News and current affairs ratings are up. Afternoon ratings are up. An increase in ratings usually means that advertising follows, but that is not the case. We are dual-funded. Like ORF in Austria or RAI in Italy, we have advertising and the license fee, and unfortunately, supermarkets and the government are pretty much the only people who are advertising. This time of year, we would usually have Booking.com, Trivago, Expedia, the airlines and national tourist boards. As businesses open, we hope advertising picks up. If McDonald’s reopens, will they go back on the air? Hopefully, they will.

WS: In this pandemic “new normal,” is it business as usual, thanks to technology?
HORAN: Thanks to technology, it absolutely is. The only thing I would say is, in many ways, it’s easier for a buyer to say no. Once people can start flying again, and it’s safe to do so, if I were the head of sales at Warner Bros. or Sony, I would get salespeople on a plane because face-to-face meetings make a difference. I genuinely believe that.