Strike Impact: RTE

DUBLIN, January 29: RTE
will be utilizing some creative scheduling with its stockpile of American
dramas to get it through the next few months, according to Dermot Horan, the
Irish broadcaster’s director of broadcast and acquisitions.

“We’re lucky in a way in
that we have a fairly unrivaled list of acquisitions from America,” Horan
notes. RTE has an output deal with Disney-ABC International Television that
covers series like Lost, Desperate
Housewives
, Criminal Minds, Grey’s Anatomy and the spinoff Private Practice. Other key U.S. acquisitions for RTE include the CSI
franchise, as well as the
long-running ER, which “still
wins its time slot every week,” Horan says, and Prison Break. “We have a nice body of material; it’s not as if
we’re depending on just one or two series.”

The bulk of RTE’s U.S.
dramas air on its secondary channel, RTE 2. The flagship channel RTE 1 airs
predominantly local fare in prime time, with the exception of ER. “We have more acquisition slots on the second
channel,” Horan notes. “What we’re having to do is accelerate the introduction
of series. Normally we would have Desperate Housewives from January to May, Tuesday at 10, and Grey’s
Anatomy
May to November, Tuesday
at 10. This year, Desperate Housewives will be January to March, then we kick in with Grey’s Anatomy and that will get us till May/June, then we will
kick in with the spinoff, Private Practice. So we’ve gotten ourselves through till the autumn without too much
pain. But if the strike continues, certainly our autumn would be affected. I am
hopeful that something will be sorted out before then.”

If the strike persists,
however, and continues to disrupt the fall season, Horan says there are a few
options available for RTE. One is commissioning more local programming. Another
is looking at the U.S. shows that have been airing on RTE in “late peak, like
11 o’clock, that we may have bought in packages from the studios. Series like Criminal
Minds
have done very well in late
peak. It’s very like CSI in
that every episode is self-contained. If we run out of episodes [of CSI], well Criminal Minds can go in that slot and do the job for us. Dramas
don’t tend to repeat but the exception to the rule does seem to be criminal
whodunits. We have the three CSIs
and certainly in the summer months we’ll use the repeats to get us through till
the autumn and hold some of the fresh episodes.”

Horan is hopeful that the
L.A. Screenings will still be held this May; the event, he notes, “gives you,
in one week, the opportunity to see the entire output of the American fall
schedule from all the networks and it means you can compare like with like and
make your decisions based on seeing everything. If the Americans moved to a
system whereby they just commission series [year-round] and you didn’t get a
chance to see them in advance, then you can bid on a show but you don’t know
what’s coming around the corner. If you can see a full slate of programming,
you can say, ok there are three criminal dramas out and I’ve seen them all and
that’s the one I like.”

Horan notes that the
Screenings provide him with a valuable opportunity to spend quality time with
the studios. “I don’t go visit the independents,” he says. “I go principally to
view the output of the U.S. majors. They have my full attention.”

For Horan, MIPTV and
MIPCOM provide the opportunity to source a range of other genres, notably kids’
fare and factual content—“documentaries, natural history, history,
extreme weather, dramatic reconstructions” all rate well for RTE, Horan says.

For full
coverage of the writers strike
click here.

—By Mansha Daswani