Jane Featherstone Issues Co-Pro Warning, Champions Mainstream Drama

Acclaimed British producer Jane Featherstone warned in her BAFTA Television Lecture that global streaming giants will significantly diminish their spend on British drama co-pros, and rallied behind “shared stories told on mainstream television.”

Quality mainstream shows are “the most important cultural force for unity and shared conversations we have,” said Featherstone, who left Kudos to set up her own indie, Sister Pictures, in 2015. “Now, more than ever, we need television dramatists to tell us stories that challenge us, unite us, remind us of the ties that bind, recall that fundamental truth that there is more that we have in common than not. Intimate and epic stories that help us understand our place in the world. Great state-of-the-nation stories with a voice and a purpose.”

The boom time in scripted has been “heavily subsidized,” Featherstone went on to say. “Whether it’s the U.K. tax break that’s driven up budgets, or virtual advertiser monopolies in free-to-air commercial TV. Or hefty deficits from distributors. Or the high-end returning drama series and soaps that have provided nursery slopes for writers, directors and producers, courtesy of public service broadcasting.”

The “quality mainstream” coming out of the BBC, Channel 4, ITV and Sky, she continued, has attracted “new and intrepid visitors, keen to explore and draw on our resources, which is where the irreversible and dynamic change comes in,” with some 500 SVOD and OTT platforms operating in the landscape. “Chief among these are Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google—or to give them their Bond villain name, FAANG.

“So, these arrivals have brought with them a new form of subsidy—a stream of money from U.S. broadcasters and from FAANG’s own apparently bottomless pockets. Budgets have escalated, demand for on-screen named talent and behind-the-scenes A-listers is sky high. Co-production has been a buzzword for the last five years. Happy marriages all…. Well, and I’m not the first person to say this: That honeymoon period? Consider it over.”

Featherstone said that until now, “co-funding has meant relatively subtle changes to the kinds of dramas being commissioned; perhaps they’re a little bigger and more globally facing. Henceforth, that subtlety will be replaced by less nuanced behavior.”

SVODs will be focusing more on fully owned originals, she added. “Why keep investing in shows where they don’t own the territory most likely to make that show a hit; it doesn’t make sense for them. The co-production tap is going to be turned off, or at least reduced to a trickle. I reckon we have a year or 18 months before the big FAANG players stop co-producing entirely, except maybe for very specific talent-driven content. With such deep pockets to reach into, why go through the hassle of sharing with traditional British broadcasters?”

Featherstone went on to discuss the consequences for the “creative ecology” of top-tier talent aligning exclusively with OTTs, as Shonda Rhimes has done with Netflix in the U.S. “Imagine a world in which Sally Wainwright worked exclusively for Apple. Or you could only watch Peter Bowker’s output on Netflix. Or Mike Bartlett was Amazon-only. Because exclusivity will be the next stage of this battle for talent. Our system of writers working on three or four things at once isn’t going to fly in the new world. So here we have the threat we must address or, as I like to see it, the challenge we must rise to: how do we nurture our mainstream storytelling—its producers and platforms—while engaging collaboratively and creatively with the new reality? Not isolationist but involved?”

That process begins with fostering talent, she said, and diversity. “How can we hope to talk to the British people about their lives if no one who creates the nation’s most popular stories has lived their experiences? We have to engage with the popular mood, and investigate it, to tell relevant and compelling stories…. We need big shows that deal with inequality, representation, abuses of power, Britain’s identity crisis, the NHS, our political system, the crisis of masculinity, the new battles over race and gender. And at the moment there aren’t enough people wanting to tell big, complex stories about big issues slap-bang in the middle of the mainstream. We seem to be confining our taste in stories which examine the popular mood to factual dramas.”

Featherstone also noted that the “current fashion for single-writer authored series has led to a place where there are hardly any opportunities for writers to train on mainstream series any more…. Let’s put a junior writer on every series by a single author—to learn, help, proof, listen, maybe write a little, but above all to be mentored. And on a salary. No more having to write six treatments for free.”

Sister Pictures is establishing a writer-in-residence program, she noted.

“It is vital to nurture and progress new talent because there is not enough to go around. And if my airy-fairy reasons aren’t enough—which they are, by the way—there’s is also an unassailable business case for taking the nurturing of talent seriously.

“Even if you just measure the success of TV storytelling in cold cash and not in the empathy it encourages or the understanding it can promote, it pays to invest in it. It makes moral and commercial sense to give the next generation, and the generation after them, real opportunities. Opportunities that, when they presented themselves to us, we took, sometimes gratefully, and sometimes for granted.

“Because those generations are already being deprived of opportunities to reach their full potential by the very system that is meant to enable them.”