RTÉ’s Dermot Horan

Dermot Horan has been with the Irish pubcaster RTÉ for three decades. As director of acquisitions and co-productions, he is responsible for creating partnerships with other broadcasters, platforms and international distributors, as well as negotiating to secure top-flight content for the channel. He tells TV Drama about what’s working best on RTÉ and how that’s impacting his buying remit.

TV DRAMA: How much of RTÉ’s current programming slate is drama? And of that, how much is acquired product?
HORAN: RTÉ is a public broadcaster, and because of that, we have a mandate to commission across all genres, from news, current affairs and sports to soap operas, drama and light entertainment. We are at record numbers in terms of commissioning Irish drama this year—over 42 hours. But actually, that isn’t enough for both our audience on linear and our increasingly important audience on the RTÉ Player, our BVOD service. So we are reliant, like other broadcasters of our size and scale, on quality international drama, which can come pretty much from anywhere. But as a principally English-speaking nation, we are quite lazy when it comes to non-English-language content. We do tend to lean not just on North America but on the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. In recent years and during Covid years, we’ve leaned more on Australia and New Zealand. We’ve gotten some really, really good content from there.

TV DRAMA: What are some of the key attributes that you have to keep top of mind?
HORAN: What is as important as, if not more important than, buying for linear channels is buying for the RTÉ Player. Often, if you’re buying a [season] three, you will want to have [seasons] one and two available for VOD. You might launch [seasons] one or two in your VOD service, maybe one or two weeks ahead of the launch of the new [season]. And increasingly, if the [season] has already run in its original territory after episode one, we will drop the [season] on the RTÉ Player. So, we have that lens in mind.

The RTÉ Player is younger than our channels. It has a sweet spot of 35- to 44-year-olds, slightly more female than male, unless it’s live sports, where people are just using the player as a live device, as sport tends to be watched live. So, we’re looking at that sweet spot of 35- to 44-year-old females and buying content for that age group. A good example—and BBC has picked this one up as well—is the ABC Australia drama The Newsreader, which is high quality. One of the things we look out for is who has commissioned a drama. If it’s another fellow public broadcaster like ABC Australia, CBC in Canada, BBC or Channel 4, we know that they will have a commissioning editor and a team of drama execs all over that show who will make sure that it works for their territory. There’s a good chance that if it works for their territory, and if the similar themes that apply in our territory work, it’ll also work for us.

TV DRAMA: What are you currently on the lookout for regarding drama acquisitions?
HORAN: We are commercially funded, as well as funded by the license fee, a bit like Rai in Italy or ZDF. We carry advertising as well as get access to a license fee. So, we do need to be mindful of the commercial [aspect] as well. Because we’re a public-service broadcaster, we have to prove to the license payer that we’re valued for money, and they’re getting very high quality for their value for money. We need to make sure that what we buy complements what we commission. If we’ve commissioned three detective series with a female protagonist, we probably won’t buy one. We might buy a male detective series. We try to complement what we’re looking at.

But we’re also looking for little standout shows that can do particularly well on the Player. A case in point would be Colin from Accounts, which we picked up just over a year ago from Paramount+. It’s not a big show. It did very little business on linear, but by word of mouth, has done really, really well on the RTÉ Player. It just puts a smile on your face. I think what we’ve seen recently is there’s an appetite—and this has happened maybe since Covid or since the development of the SVODs—for half-hour dramas as well. Back in the day, every drama had to be an hour or commercial-hour long. But shows like Normal People worked well as a half-hour.

Colin from Accounts, which is a half-hour dramedy/comedy, really works well as a half-hour. That little treat. What we’ve discovered as well, looking at our audience research, is that people have less time to watch “sit-down and sit-back” content than they would have in the past. In the past, people maybe spent three hours a day just sitting back on their sofa watching TV. That no longer applies.

People watch more audiovisual content than ever before, but a lot of that is watching YouTube, looking at social media during the day and video clips. But that ability, maybe when you got the kids to bed, you’ve made the pack lunches and you’re ready to sit down with your partner or on your own to watch, you might only have about 90 minutes. That 90 minutes could be a drama followed by a half-hour, or it could be three little half-hours. We’re conscious that that’s the amount of time people have, and you have to be able to give them a treat.

That’s why drama is so important, and that’s why the SVODs and the pay platforms put a lot of time, effort and money into drama, and we have to do the same. At the end of the day, sitting down watching the news, then watching a soap, then watching a documentary, then watching a drama for three-and-a-half hours—I don’t think that applies anymore.

TV DRAMA: When it comes to rights, what’s your stance on exclusivity?
HORAN: Most people in Ireland can receive the British channels, so even if we’re the first run with a BBC drama or a Channel 4 drama in Ireland, a lot of people in Ireland would have already had access to it. But we want to make sure that when we get it, at least we’re exclusive against all the Irish broadcasters. That’s for the first run.

Where things are getting a bit more malleable and flexible is on the second runs and earlier series. So the would-be library series that we pick up, Irish dramas—be they commissions or co-productions, like The Fall and Dublin Murders—those kinds of shows, we would cohabit often with the likes of Netflix or Prime Video because people will come to us via, you know, looking for Irish drama. They might be coming by Netflix or Prime Video just looking for crime drama. So I think in the library world, we can be non-exclusive, but you know, we’d like to be exclusive within Ireland.