Detective, Melodrama & Drama Genres Lead Russian TV Market

MOSCOW: There were approximately 650 TV series and TV films at different production stages in Russia in 2013, according to KVG Research, which reports that detective, melodrama and drama were the most popular television genres.

Channel One, Russia 1 and NTV accounted for more than 60 percent of all projects. At the same time, Ukrainian broadcasters continued to comprise an important market, with almost half of all completed projects premiered on Ukrainian channels. An average window between the Ukrainian and Russian premiere was three and a half months.

In terms of most popular TV genres, detective, melodrama and drama together made up 56 percent of all production content. TV films were mostly connected with melodrama: almost half of TV films with two and four episodes were melodrama. TV series up to 24 episodes became the most popular content type (82 percent). There were also a high percentage of policemen and other law enforcement officers (25 percent) as the professions of the main characters in TV series and TV films. In second place by popularity are soldiers and officers of special services and reconnaissance (12 percent). For TV projects, 81 percent were set in present day and 11 percent were set in the Soviet period and Perestroika.

Anastasia Vasilieva, the director of strategy at KVG Research, commented, "More than 200 new unique projects were launched to replace ones which were shown on TV. In addition, the share of inactive projects, which did not change its production stage over four quarters, was equal only to 10 percent."