Richard Bradley on Navigating the Factual Commissioning Landscape

Richard Bradley, co-founder and chief creative officer of All3Media-owned Lion Television, joined the TV Real Festival to discuss how the acclaimed outfit is navigating the opportunities and challenges in factual commissioning today.

Lion Television has built up an eclectic slate across multiple genres, including a wealth of critically acclaimed history docs like Pompeii: The New Dig and buzzy true crime like Diddy: In Plain Sight. You can watch Bradley’s keynote conversation with Mansha Daswani here.

“We are in strangely tough times,” Bradley said of the factual commissioning space today. “People have become more risk-averse; they’re making fewer decisions, postponing decisions and battening down the hatches around the familiar. The question has been, is this here to stay, or is it cyclical? The difficult news is it probably isn’t going to come back to the way it was, and what we’re seeing at the moment is the way of the future. There’s going to be fewer decisions, less commissions made and probably a more risk-averse decision-making process.”

Bradley and the team have been tapping into their deep expertise in co-productions. “It was thought to be a slightly laborious way to make television, but everyone now is a fan of co-production. Even some of those parties that in the past wouldn’t brook working with another partner are all looking for that. We have, for nearly 25 years, been co-producing in one way or another between broadcasters, sometimes between producers. Aside from the streamers, almost every project we do that is international is a co-production.”

Bradley then offered some tips for what makes for a successful co-pro. “Being transparent up front; you don’t want to sell one thing to one party and one to another. You don’t want to be making three different shows. Also working out postproduction—thinking about how you’re going to land it for everybody. Are you going to make one version for everybody, which can be challenging, but can be the best solution? Or two-thirds of the way through the edit, will you start making different versions? Factor in a good extra amount into the postproduction budget. And establish good relationships because if you can do it once successfully with your co-production partners, it makes it much easier the second time around.”

Underpinning Lion’s diverse factual slate is a “degree of strong journalism. We do stories we feel have strong underpinnings of research. We’re trying to find things that connect with audiences. We’ve always been thinking both local and global. Thinking beyond your immediate environs is essential now, in a world where the opportunities are fewer and farther between.”

True crime and celebrity continue to top commissioner wish lists, Bradley said. “It will change,” he predicts. “One of the challenges is when the streamers and the broadcasters say they want true crime, they actually mean American crime, with a bit of U.K. crime. We are developing those stories, but the secret hope is that the big hits come from defeating the algorithm. If you look at the big drama hits of last year on Netflix, Baby Reindeer and Adolescence, they are not things the algorithm would have told you to commission. And yet they connected. We spend quite a lot of time in our development team thinking not just about true crime and celebrity, but what is the other thing that they’re not thinking about that we can persuade them that might start a new trend and broaden the slate.”

History has long been a key focus at Lion. Daswani asked Bradley about navigating that space and bringing in new audiences to it. The key is authenticity, he said. “You don’t necessarily jet in an Anglo-American host to stand in front of the people who are doing the archaeology. You foreground the people doing that. The younger audience isn’t afraid of subtitles. They like authenticity. Archaeology can be one of the dullest things going, but if you’re there at the moment of discovery, you’ve got drama. So, authenticity, big stories and thinking freshly about history. It’s thinking imaginatively about it, but also listening to the audience. This audience wants authenticity and immediacy. If you can give them a ringside seat, which seems a funny thing to say about history, that helps.”

Embracing digital content has also helped Lion Television mitigate the challenges of the market. He referenced what the company did with the BBC documentary Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating, releasing an extended clip on Instagram and TikTok that got more than 23 million views in four days. “Every program we go into now, we are also thinking about the additional content.”

Being part of the All3Media family has been hugely beneficial in this landscape, Bradley said. “Being part of a bigger group gives you that sense of a cushion, but also the combined expertise garnered from all the different companies, a fantastic distribution network that has smart, digital intelligence so that you can hopefully sweat your franchises and programs as well as you can. It feels less chilly and less anxiety-inducing.”

Synergies within the company have also been advantageous. Of note, Lion is co-producing with Objective Fiction a drama for Netflix called Legends; that project started as a doc development at Lion.

AI is being “cautiously” embraced at Lion, Bradley said, including using it to make production processes more efficient. “We’re trying to look at AI consciously and as a tool rather than run away from it in horror and fear.” For example, in the works is When Socrates Meets Confucius, a co-production with China, which “imagines what would have happened if they’d met. We’ve taken all of their writings, fed those into a large language model, fed all of the images of them into AI and then through that concocted the conversation they might’ve had if those two great philosophers had ever met in the past. That’s a really interesting use of AI. So, consciously embracing it, thinking about it and applying it. We can’t run away from it.”

Brand-funded programming is an area of growth, Bradley noted. “That’s an area where production skills and capabilities and broadcasters and brands can get together to make interesting content.”

Ultimately, Bradley said, the goal is devising projects “that the commissioners find impossible to resist. A commissioner once described their role as finding a thousand different ways to say no. To those of us out there who are on the other side of the fence, let’s put our thinking caps on and try and find ways to make them say yes. That underpins a lot of what we do in development. How do you take something into a broadcaster that they just won’t be able to resist? It’s getting harder, but it’s not impossible.”