Playground’s Colin Callender

Playground Founder Colin Callender talks to TV Drama about the inspiration for launching the independent production company, the effects of the streaming explosion and finding new projects.

Since exiting HBO Films, Colin Callender has become a go-to independent producer for high-end U.S.-U.K. co-productions. A pioneer in facilitating transatlantic projects, Callender’s long list of credits at Playground, which he established in 2012, includes Wolf Hall, Howards End, The Spanish Princess and King Lear, with All Creatures Great and Small, based on the James Herriot novels, commissioned by Channel 5 and PBS Masterpiece.

TV DRAMA: What was the mission when you set up Playground?
CALLENDER: Years ago, I started a company called Primetime Television with a British distributor named Richard Price, and we pioneered packaging co-productions. This was before the advent of Channel 4. We would acquire material, develop it, presell it internationally to ZDF or TF1 or whoever, and then bring it back to the U.K. to either the BBC or ITV. They would make it, but we would use the co-production money we had raised to leverage retaining the distribution rights. I have been actively involved in the co-production business really from the beginning of my career. In 2012, it was very clear that international co-productions were driving big-budget, high-quality drama productions. And this was an area I knew very well. While I was at HBO, we did an enormous amount of co-productions, but they were projects we started and then went out into the market to find co-production money. I felt that it was a great time to start an independent production company that was driven in large part by co-productions. That has been the strategy for the company: a mix of indigenous drama for the U.K. and then higher-budgeted event dramas that would attract co-financing It’s a very buoyant, exciting time to do that.

TV DRAMA: When you founded the company, Netflix was doing just a handful of originals in the U.S. and wasn’t even thinking about international. What has the streaming explosion meant for Playground, and indie producers in general?
CALLENDER: The streaming model is very seductive, but it is a time bomb that is at some point going to explode and blow up the British independent sector if the public-service broadcasters and the commercial networks don’t remain healthy. The streamers are a very exciting new frontier, but the health of the British independent production market is dependent on a healthy BBC, a healthy Channel 4, a healthy ITV. What’s interesting is how those two universes are going to coexist. I think at the end of the day, the British broadcasters and the streamers may want different things. Time will tell as the market evolves whether their creative objectives are aligned or if, in fact, they are editorially in different spaces.

TV DRAMA: How do you find new projects?
CALLENDER: Everything changes and nothing changes. As producers, we spend our lives looking for great, exciting projects that invigorate us. It’s more important than ever that a project should somehow break through the clutter. The clutter is more cluttered than it’s ever been. And the truth is that with the rapid expansion of all the new platforms, there hasn’t been a similar explosion of top-end writing and directing talent. So there’s much greater competition now for the established writers and directors. Part of the fun, as a producer, is finding new talent, new directors, new writers, and nurturing them. That’s a very important part of our business.

TV DRAMA: With so much drama being produced by the streamers, will there be an inevitable decline in quality?
CALLENDER: That’s the challenge of a volume business rather than a boutique business. That’s a perennial challenge. Back in the Camelot days of HBO, one of the things we prided ourselves on was the consistency across all genres that we were working on. But one of the things that is exciting is the surprises come from unexpected places. So you get shows like The End of the F***ing World or Stranger Things that come out of left field and that maybe on paper looked interesting but didn’t look as if they’d actually break out. Part of the fun of having a breadth of a slate is the ability to take risks; some work, some don’t work. Success comes from unexpected places. That’s the great advantage that [the streamers] have: the ability to spend on a broad range of programming. They can take risks in a way that maybe others can’t.

TV DRAMA: The landscape has changed so much since you founded Primetime Television. Have the core fundamentals of co-pro financing remained largely the same?
CALLENDER: You know, in many senses, it’s all the same. There are two challenges. One is, casting the finance is almost as important as casting the right actors. Getting the right financial partners and putting them together in a way that supports a project rather than pulls it apart is a key challenge for any co-production. The other thing is making sure that everyone is on the same page editorially from the get-go, so everybody is making the same show. In terms of the productions we’re doing at Playground, we tend to try to finance them with the smallest number of co-producers possible, so we can protect the creative team from the stresses and strains that multiple co-producers can put on a project.

TV DRAMA: How do you work with external distribution partners?
CALLENDER: There are a lot of very good distributors out there at the moment. The challenge is structuring the financing so that the minimum guarantee you get from a distributor doesn’t prevent you as a producer from actually participating in the backend. It’s a balance between getting a healthy distribution advance versus making sure that you can still see some backend once the show is marketed worldwide. But there’s no shortage of distributors right now. The real challenge that everyone is facing is the danger of the perception—and I don’t believe this is reality—that the streamers are causing everyone to have to spend more to make the shows bigger and better. It’s certainly the case that the increased volume of production, in England particularly, has increased the cost of production. Crew costs and so forth are going through the roof. So there is no question that streamers have impacted production costs in that way. But I don’t believe editorially you have to de facto have a high-budget production for it to compete in the marketplace. Things like Game of Thrones and The Crown have had enormous budgets. But time and time again, shows break out without having enormous budgets. Fleabag or End of the F***ing World or Sex Education are not high-budget shows. And I think it’s a mistake to think that, certainly as British producers, the only way we can succeed in the international marketplace is if we embark on very, very expensive shows.

TV DRAMA: You’ve opted to remain a true independent when many companies have become a part of larger groups. Why has this been important for you?
CALLENDER: We want to produce shows that we believe in, and that will speak to the top-end quality part of the market. And for the moment, we’ve decided to remain independent. We had a great relationship with Starz, we’re continuing to work with them, but we no longer have an overall deal. We are unencumbered right now, and that gives us versatility in the marketplace to talk to any potential partner, any potential distributor. There’s certainly an advantage to that. It allows us to look at each project and then go out and put the funding together in the most effective way that works for the show.

TV DRAMA: What are some of the projects you’re working on now that you’re particularly excited about?
CALLENDER: We’ve wrapped the first season of All Creatures Great and Small. It’s been enormous fun shooting it. I do think that there is an audience, given the mad, mad world that we live in today, for a show where you can sit back, put your feet up, have a cup of coffee or tea, and enjoy it knowing that it’s just great entertainment. James Herriot’s books have millions and millions of fans around the world. It’s a wonderful new cast. We shot it entirely on-location in Yorkshire, so it looks beautiful. And it’s been a joy to watch. We’re about to start shooting Dangerous Liaisons, which Harriet Warner has written, with Starz and Lionsgate. We are telling the story from the perspective of the central female character, who is navigating a man’s world. The themes that underpin it are very much of the moment. It’s a story of female empowerment in a male-dominated world. That is very timely. Nina Raine is writing Tender Is the Nightfor Hulu. That will follow in the tradition of our big miniseries adaptations like Howards End and Wolf Hall. The ability to adapt a literary classic like Tender Is the Night and give it time and allow the story to breathe over four hours is a luxury you don’t have when you try to do a story like that as a movie. So our slate is a mix of returning series and high-profile limited series, event series. It’s fun. And there’s a lot more to come. We have an Amazon deal to do a series of single films. The first was with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in King Lear. We’re working on what the next titles will be.

This interview was conducted prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Media companies are currently shifting their strategies in the wake of production postponements and economic trends.