Trip Down Memory Lane

 

The British series Downton Abbey, set in World War I–era England with its entrenched class structure, walked away with 16 nods at this year’s Emmy Award nominations, making it the most nominated British show in the Emmys’ history when combined with last year’s nominations. The show is just one of several recent series from Europe that not only prove that dramatic TV narratives set in the past are in demand with today’s broadcasters and audiences, but also illustrate how their production techniques are evolving and becoming more sophisticated. 

 

Gareth Neame, Downton Abbey’s executive producer and managing director at Carnival Films and NBCUniversal International Television Production, argues that audiences have always been intrigued by the dynamics involving England’s upper classes and the servants literally below them, when the country’s empire ruled half the world.

 

“Stories set in grand English country houses form a genre that audiences worldwide are familiar with and are perennially popular,” Neame says. “This was the British Empire at its height, but it was also the beginning of its end.”

 

Television producers have often exploited period drama’s ability to take us away into imaginary but recognized worlds. Whether based on literary classics like Jane Austen’s works or original concepts like Downton Abbey, they fill prime-time slots, generate high audience ratings internationally and make money when done well.

 

“British and European period drama is crafted to a wonderful standard, and broadcasters around the world know this, based on precedent and knowledge of such creativity,” says Greg Phillips, the president of Content Television and Digital, which is launching The Scapegoat at MIPCOM. The ITV1 drama stars Matthew Rhys and Eileen Atkins and is adapted from the 1957 Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name. “Time and again, period dramas have worked well and delivered,” Phillips says, adding that their timeless quality means a long shelf life for both networks and distributors. 

 

DRAMATIC RENAISSANCE
“Period dramas are having a renaissance, and Downton Abbey has paved the way,” says Kate Lewis, an executive producer at the U.K.-based ITV Studios, the sister company to the ITV network that originally commissioned the series. ITV is gambling on the genre again with Mr Selfridge, a drama series, which Lewis is executive producing, that tells the story of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the flamboyant American who built the iconic London department store Selfridges at the start of the 20th century. ITV Studios Global Entertainment has been selling the show worldwide and has already scored presales in a number of markets, including the U.S. with PBS’s Masterpiece.

 

“Downton Abbey’s popularity has opened the way for people to ask what else was going on around that period,” Lewis notes. “But they will not want another Downton Abbey. Mr Selfridge is about the future, it is about the history of retail at a time when women were enjoying a new sense of freedom.” 

 

CONTEMPORARY TAKE
Experts agree that the current economic slump means audiences could do with some diversion into times gone by. “In times of a downturn, people do look to a nostalgic past and Downton Abbey nails that,” Lewis adds.

 

Period fiction produced today features the twists and turns normally associated with contemporary fiction. The languid tempo of Brideshead Revisited in the 1980s and the original Upstairs, Downstairs in the 1970s would not appeal to our digitally demanding audiences. “Today’s audiences are drawn to the contemporary pace of the storytelling, like a soap opera, fast-paced with interconnected multiple story lines and set in clearly defined environments,” Carnival’s Neame says. 

 

“If a modern approach is taken, it makes the ‘leap’ into a specific time period completely accessible for audiences worldwide,” states Rola Bauer, the president of the Munich-based Tandem Communications. Currently on Tandem’s plate is the $44 million mini-series World Without End, the sequel to The Pillars of the Earth. World Without End has already been presold to more than 120 countries.

 

Tandem’s other historically themed projects include Pompeii, with Sony Pictures Television; Labyrinth, a German–South African co-production; and Titanic: Blood and Steel, which is being distributed by Tandem for the De Angelis Group, based in Italy.

 

If quality is of the essence, period dramas will never come cheap. Setting narratives in our rapidly evolving world, whether they’re from as far back as Biblical times or as recent as the 1980s, requires the reconstruction of locales, fashion, architecture, interior design and transportation, among other requirements. 

 

Copper, a ten-part, one-hour thriller from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson, is set in Five Points, one of the grimiest parts of 1860s New York City. Its budget matches the “high end of budgets for a one-hour U.S. cable-TV drama,” says Christina Wayne, the president of Cineflix Studios, which co-produced Copper with Germany’s Beta Film. Although she admits that the budget might not be as much as HBO’s most expensive shows, the company still needed presales to BBC America and Canada’s Shaw Media, with Beta Film handling international rights, to cover costs.

 

In Spain, each episode of The Red Eagle (Águila Roja), an adventure series produced by Globomedia and distributed by its sister company Imagina International Sales, cost about €800,000. Based on the adventures of a masked 17th-century justice-seeking hero, a cross between Robin Hood and Zorro, The Red Eagle has been a massive hit in Spain since its debut in 2009. On the state-owned RTVE’s La 1 network, The Red Eagle has been known to snap up a 31-percent-plus audience share (more than 6 million viewers). “The only programs that get more viewers have been live Spanish soccer games, especially when Spain won the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the Euro 2012 tournaments,” says Géraldine Gonard, the Madrid-based sales director at Imagina International Sales. 

 

RTVE has put transmission of The Red Eagle’s fifth season (and other major dramas) on hold while the country sorts out its economic calamity. Until then, the demand for period dramas has spurred Globomedia to create more, including In the Heart of the Ocean (El Corazón del océano), which is set during Spain’s colonization of Latin America following Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the Americas. It is scheduled to debut on Spain’s Antena 3 network.

 

The Red Eagle has been sold to broadcasters and distributors in the Asia Pacific, Eastern and Western Europe, and Latin America. Gonard, however, admits that Globomedia and its sister production companies would consider co-productions for future historical fiction. “They are going to be much more popular in the future, but also much more expensive. So we would need co-production partners and stories that resonate in any country.”

 

Tandem has garnered a reputation for getting expensive productions off the ground thanks to its skills in joining forces with like-minded international partners.“Tandem has always based its business model on the complex process of co-productions,” Bauer explains. “The company recognizes the business potential of offering its partners prime-time event programs that they can market [domestically] but at a fraction of the financial risk. This model is robust, even in serious economic times.”

 

The authenticity, accuracy and forensic research required when reproducing the past should be uncompromising because audiences will point out errors.

 

“With the Internet, you need to be ten times more careful and, for the show’s integrity, you need to be precise,” states Cineflix’s Wayne, who enlisted the expertise of a history professor, Daniel Czitrom, in reenacting 1864 New York faithfully. “We spent weeks on photo references. An article of clothing would not be used if the fabric didn’t exist at the time, sidewalks couldn’t look pristine and we would even argue about the curve of a shoe,” Wayne quips.

 

Location shoots bring their own challenges for period fiction. Germany’s Beta Film is distributing Mary, a co-production involving Italy’s Lux Vide, RAI Fiction, Spain’s Telecinco Cinema, and Germany’s Tellux Film and BR. A significant part of the mini-series was shot in Tunisia. “For a story like this, you needed the desert, ancient cities and a lot of sun, so we knew it had to be Tunisia or Morocco,” says Eric Welbers, Beta Film’s managing director. 

 

The British public broadcaster BBC is considered by many to be the home of the period drama, with a deep catalogue of family-viewing ratings hits. Call the Midwife has been a British Sunday prime-time success for the BBC, with as many as 11 million viewers. It follows the daily trials, tribulations and triumphs of young midwives working at a convent in poverty-stricken East London during the 1950s. One of its newest period pieces is Parade’s End. Budgeted at a reported £13 million (€16.5 million), it is a five-part production based on the Ford Madox Ford quartet of novels and produced by Mammoth Screen for the BBC and HBO. It premiered in the U.K. in August. The presales have involved BBC Worldwide, ARTE, Breakout Films and Lookout Point.

 

With a stellar cast, which includes Benedict Cumberbatch (whose breakout role, coincidentally, is the modernization of Victorian England’s most famous sleuth in Sherlock) and Rebecca Hall, Parade’s End was adapted by the Oscar-winning British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard.

 

Parade’s End encapsulates the ingredients that can ensure a period drama’s effectiveness, says Caroline Torrance, BBC Worldwide’s director of drama. “It brings the audience in by giving them a great writer and a wonderful cast. A good period drama needs a good hook to make people want to watch.”

 

Other new titles on BBC Worldwide’s slate are Ripper Street, which takes place during the period shortly after the Jack the Ripper murders; The Paradise, set in a fictional department store; and Spies of Warsaw, adapted from World War II historical spy novels by the U.S. writer Alan Furst.

 

RISK AND REWARD
A good period drama demands tenacity, as it is never the easiest of genres to create, says Michael Oesterlin, the executive VP for international sales at Germany’s Tele München Group. “Depending on the project (and the period), the pool of feasible locations and crews with the necessary expertise becomes smaller. Indeed this, albeit to a lesser extent, extends even to the options for casting on-screen talent. On set, one might say there is less flexibility and that the planning required for period dramas can limit spontaneity.”

 

Rikolt von Gagern, a producer of TMG’s English-language productions Moby Dick and The Sea Wolf, adds, “Research plays an important and unavoidable role throughout the production. It can prove a slow and costly process. It is, however, the detail unearthed through research that sets great work apart.”