Kudos Takes Over Lovely Day, Shine Pictures

LONDON: Endemol Shine's Lovely Day and Shine Pictures will now be part of Kudos, the company's U.K.-based scripted content outfit known for hits like Broadchurch and Humans.

Kudos founded the Lovely Day label in 2010 under Diederick Santer. Earlier this year, Santer was named joint CEO of Kudos alongside Daniel Isaacs. Upcoming shows, among them ITV's Grantchester, will be made under the Kudos banner. Shine Pictures will continue to produce feature films (its credits include Salmon Fishing in the Yemen), but it will expand its output to include long-form drama featuring film talent. Its managing director, Ollie Madden, will become an executive producer at Kudos, and Kudos will take over the label's development slate. Richard Cookson, Lovely Day’s head of development, becomes senior development executive within Kudos. Shine Pictures’ Alice Pearse moves to the role of development executive.

Santer commented: “Kudos has worked in close partnership with both companies for some time so bringing them under the same roof makes sense creatively and practically, and bringing Lovely Day and Shine Pictures’ projects into Kudos makes for a richer creative mix. Furthermore, with talent now moving more freely than ever between film and television, it feels timely and natural that Ollie should be working across both forms from within Kudos.”

Madden added: “I’m hardly alone in thinking it’s a very exciting time to work in television. The scale and breadth of subject matters that can now be explored feels limitless. To be able to make ambitious, longer-form work alongside our existing feature projects is the best of both worlds, and there is no company I would rather do that with than Kudos."